


fine young cannibals

by somethingdifferent



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Twilight Fusion, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, F/M, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Loss of Virginity, Minor Poe Dameron/Rey, Non-Graphic Violence, Unsafe Sex, Vampire Ben Solo, Vampire Kylo Ren, Vampires, Virgin Rey (Star Wars), Voyeurism, Who’s to say, bc of said vampirism, but he’s not gonna kill rey even a little bit, but maybe he will be?, dubious consent on that voyeurism but like bella rey is into it, he does rough her up a little in chapter one tho be WARNED, he is a VAMPIRE and rey is OFFERING, hella age difference, he’s a vampire so he does in fact kill people, i will add tags as needed please let me know if i’m missing any!!, it is all reylo in this fic, poe is just edward, poe will be the spurned romantic rival, some discussion of vampire-human hybrid babies, sorry poe, they are not going to end up together tho lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:55:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26822509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: Kylo raised his head to the sky as he inhaled, his broad chest expanding even wider. His eyes fluttered shut, savoring the scent like a sumptuous meal. He grinned.“Oh,” he murmured, so softly Rey wasn’t even sure it was meant for her ears. His eyes slid to meet hers, scarlet and violent and hungry. “You brought a snack.”And then all hell broke loose.About three things, Rey is absolutely positive:First, she is totally, completely, and madly in love with her vampire boyfriend, Poe.Second, there is another vampire—an older, evil,definitely-not-hotvampire—that thirsts for her blood and wants nothing more than to kill her.And third, she is maybe not absolutely positive about either of these things.[reylo twilight fusion au, only kylo ren is the third act villain and rey is for sure not into him, like, even at all]
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 306
Kudos: 1132





	1. the hunter

**Author's Note:**

> hello welcome to my most self-indulgent fic yet: the one where rey is bella swan and poe is edward cullen and kylo ren is the evil vampire james who tries to kidnap bella in the first book. this fic answers the question no one ever asked, which is, but what if james was hot. hopefully you will all enjoy the results!
> 
> a million BILLION thank you's to [ VIOLET ](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) who beta'd this chapter and made it into the coherent thing you see before you!!! she is incredible amazing showstopping spectacular and a lovely human person
> 
> my goal for this fic is to update it once even two weeks. maybe even once a week GASP but we’ll aim for two :~)
> 
> also yo whaddup follow me on twitter if u want @janedazey

_ I decided as long as I'm going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly. _

** the hunter **

Rey feels stupid.

She _is_ stupid.

Only an idiot, she berates herself silently, would be fooled so easily, lured into something that was so obviously a trap.

Because it was. That much is brutally apparent to her now.

And, if she’s being perfectly honest with herself, she should have known Kylo didn’t really kidnap her mother. It’s the oldest trick in the book, using a home video recording of her mother shouting, _Rey! Rey!_ as a fake hostage call. It feels almost cliched, like something he lifted from a cheesy B-grade movie. In fact, she’s sure that if she looked she’d be able to find his inspiration in some old horror film, maybe even a creature feature where humans dressed up in a vague facsimile of his kind prowl around in the dark, wearing capes that they use to cover their mouths, saying “Bleh!” or “I _vant_ to _suck_ your _blood_ ” (emphasis theirs). Poe finds those adaptations amusing; Rey has a sneaking suspicion Kylo would find them mildly to moderately offensive.

In a similar vein ( _ha ha_ , she thinks, sardonic in her fright), Rey can’t help but wonder why Kylo chose this—her old childhood dance studio—for a meeting point to give herself up. How very dramatic of him after all. Vampires: always with the _theatrics_. It must be due to all that boredom, the time they accumulate like money in the bank, wealthy with hours. Nothing better to do than create elaborate traps for unimportant humans and cause bloody, violent chaos. _And didn’t I always warn you about that,_ her boyfriend’s voice admonishes her in her own brain.

If she survives this, she can’t help but think, Poe is going to be so mad at her.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Rey has always hated baseball.

There’s a lot of reasons for that, really. It’s boring. It’s hot. It lasts forever. It’s the reason why her mother is never home anymore, chasing after a man she’s known for less than two years. It’s the reason why she moved to this damp, gray, godforsaken town, to live with a father she barely knows.

It’s the reason why everything happened, too. In that field, with Poe standing in front of her. Holding his body to shield her own, his knees bent, hands clenched into fists. There was a low, deep sound rumbling through the air that Rey mistook, for a moment, as thunder.

It wasn’t. It was Poe. _Growling._

“It’ll be great,” he had assured her earlier, as he stuffed a baseball cap onto her head, flattening the hair she spent ages trying to perfect, just to look good for him. “My family plays the game a little—” he cocked his head, thinking of the right word, “differently.”

And it was good, for a while. _Poe_ was good—fast and strong and athletic. Rey liked watching him, she always has: the strong cut of his jaw, the way he carries himself without effort. She sat on the sidelines and let his family play baseball in front of her.

It was good. It was fun. It was easy, to watch them, to be entertained.

She thought, for a horrible moment, about her mother doing the exact same thing. She pushed the idea out of her head.

Then: the slow stride of three figures across the field. Finn pausing and calling out to the others. The smiles falling off of their faces, each of them walking toward each other.

And then: Poe standing in front of her, hackles raised, while the vampire in front, the one with red hair, asked to join their game.

They were beautiful, the three of them. Just like the rest of Poe’s family. Just like every vampire is, Poe said—beautiful and venomous. Beauty like the jaws of a snake, like sharp teeth.

The first one to speak, the ginger-haired one, tall and thin and aristocratic, introduced himself with a flourish as Armitage Hux. The woman to his side—Phasma, he called her—was icy cold and brilliant, glittering even under the cover of clouds. The other man, the silent one standing behind the other two, the one with ivory skin and ebony hair and the darkest crimson eyes Rey had ever seen, was Kylo Ren.

Kylo was the one who scented her first. When the wind shifted, buffeting the strands of her hair, carrying her smell. Like strawberries, Poe told her once, smiling gently, brushing her cheek with the back of his knuckles.

Kylo raised his head to the sky as he inhaled, his broad chest expanding even wider. His eyes fluttered shut, savoring the scent like a sumptuous meal. He grinned.

“Oh,” he murmured, so softly Rey wasn’t even sure it was meant for her ears. His eyes slid to meet hers, scarlet and violent and _hungry_. “You brought a snack.”

And then all hell broke loose.

  
  
  
  
  


Poe has _saved_ her, and more than once.

He’s handsome and strong, kind and sweet. He holds her hand walking through the hallways at school. He kisses her softly, cupping her face in his hands. 

He’s the reason why she first started to think Forks might not be so bad after all.

He’s going to save her again, Rey thinks, not a little bit desperately. She’s sure of it.

He’s just running a little bit late.

Rey backs up further into the room as Kylo stalks closer, until the ballet barre hits her lower back. The room is wide and mirrored. It’s large enough to fit twenty children dancing poorly, but it feels like a broom closet with a vampire in it, standing between her and the door.

Because Kylo is... _big._ Bigger than her, bigger than Poe, bigger than the rest of the Dameron family. He doesn’t so much take up space as demand it open itself up for him, with his tree trunk legs, thick arms, corded with muscle, shoulders as wide as her truck.

And he’s been hunting her. Chasing her. Tormenting the love of her life, making her fear for hers. As a child, Rey used to imagine how it would be to live through something, to be challenged and tested, to be brought to the brink and live to tell the tale. It had all seemed so _exciting_ when she pictured it.

Now, though, it doesn’t seem so great. In fact, she realizes, it kind of fucking blows.

Kylo has trapped her here, in her old ballet studio, and he’s stalking toward her like they’re about to show the fuck down. Like this is their high noon. All because Rey was stupid enough to believe the obviously fake hostage call from her mother.

Rey instinctively rolls her eyes at that thought. If she survives this, Poe will be sure to lecture her again about _acting impulsively_ ; she can imagine his disappointed voice now.

“I’m sorry.” Kylo’s voice, low and annoyed, interrupts her musings. “Am I boring you?”

Rey makes a show of scoffing and folds her arms across her chest. She strolls in front of the barre and bares her teeth in a facsimile of a smile. “Yeah, kinda.”

She had hoped, distantly, that he might be somewhat annoyed with her lack of intimidation. She is disappointed when he just smirks. “We’ll have to fix that, then, won’t we, pet?”

He takes a step closer; Rey jerks back.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.” Her chin tilts up, some leftover animal instinct, trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and this—this _predator._ This carnivore coming closer and closer. The wall is at her back, Kylo at her front. No way out, ostensibly.

So it seems.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” he says, deadly quiet.

“Then it seems we’re at an impasse.”

His smirk grows, stretching into a grin. “Not really.”

She raises her shoulders to her ears, affecting nonchalance. Her eyes dart away from his, toward the door. She was the fastest girl on track and field. If she runs, she thinks—if she runs, she might be able to— “Your funeral,” she says breezily.

“Oh?” He is pacing in front of her like a tiger would. “And why do you think that?”

“If you let me go right now—if you let me walk away from here unscathed—”

“Then what, sweetheart?” His voice is a bludgeon, blunt and designed to maim. “Your little boyfriend will just let me walk away unharmed? No. No, you started this. We’re going to finish it. Together.”

Her eyebrows knit together. As subtly as she can, she bends her knees. “I started this how? What did I do besides exist?”

Kylo shrugs. “You were tempting,” he says.

Rey runs. 

She gets halfway down the ballet barre, her legs pumping, lungs burning, when Kylo stops her progress with a hand on her shoulder, another on her waist. He shoves her, hard enough that her head cracks back against the mirror, and Rey screams, the sound ripped out of her throat without her permission.

She promised herself she wasn’t going to scream.

He tuts, almost kindly. “We can’t have that, little one,” he murmurs. “We’re just getting started.”

Her throat feels scraped raw. But she’s not going to scream again; she will tear her vocal cords out before she screams again. She takes a shuddering breath and squeezes her eyes open and shut. “Are we?” She’s pleased when the words barely shake on their way out of her mouth. “I thought we were just about finished.”

“So spirited,” Kylo says quietly. “Is that why that little vampire feels so drawn to you?” He inches his body closer to her, sliding the hand on her waist up her side, just barely missing brushing over the underside of her breast. Rey shivers; her jaw clenches. “Or is it something else,” he muses. “Your pretty face? Your sweet scent?”

Rey tilts her face away from him, but it only seems to make him more amused. She _hates_ him. This creature holding her down, trying to intimidate her, scare her like a cheap Halloween mask. But she won’t be frightened, she decides. He won’t scare her. Over her dead body will she let him do that. 

Kylo grips her chin in his thick fingers and holds her face in his wide palm. “Answer me,” he says.

“I—I don’t know,” she manages after a moment. “You’d have to ask Poe.”

“What’s fun about that?” Kylo shifts, and Rey shifts with him. His fingers are inching along her jaw, creeping slowly. _Caressing_ her. Working their way down the side of her throat. “Or is it something else?” he goes on. His eyes lower to her mouth; his voice lowers with it. “What makes you so special? So...irresistible?”

“Nothing,” she manages. “There’s nothing special about me.”

He laughs, and the sound curls through the air, acrid and bitter as smoke. “Oh, I think we both know that’s not true.”

His fingers tighten on her jaw. His gaze flickers back to hers.

“Maybe it’s this,” he says, pressing his middle finger threateningly to her pulse point. “Do you know how warm you are, pet? How very tender?” He’s leaving bruises on her neck, she’s certain. They’ll be the shape of his fingers. “So soft. So easy to— _break_ in. All that blood, just pumping away.”

“Fuck you,” she spits out, gritting the words through her teeth.

A quiet huff of laughter leaves his mouth. “You’d like to, wouldn’t you,” he says, taunting.

“You wish,” she grinds out.

“I do wish,” he agrees easily. “You wouldn’t regret it.” His free hand drags up her stomach, between her breasts, to wrap into her hair. “The things I could do to you—this sweet little human body—”

Rey angles toward him, letting their hips align.

“—things your boyfriend couldn’t even spell—”

She tips her head up, takes a deep breath.

“—could break you into pieces and put you back together and you’d beg me to do it again the minute we were finished—”

She knees him in the crotch.

Kylo grunts, probably more from shock than pain. His body bends back, his grasp on her loosening just enough for Rey to slip away again. She ducks under the circle of his arms and sprints, faster this time, faster, pushing her muscles to the breaking point, her eyes fixed on the door, on the outside world, on Poe.

Strong arms wrap around her middle. Rey doesn’t scream this time; she kicks, hard, against his thighs, she drops all her weight down, she thrashes in his hold as wildly as a caged bird.

None of it matters. Kylo takes her to the ground like she weighs nothing.

He holds her in place with his weight, with a firm grip trapping both arms to the side of her head, with his legs tangled into hers, one knee between her knees, his foot hooked over her ankle.

“Stronger than I thought you’d be,” he gasps out. “So much fire—”

“Kill me,” she hisses. “Bite me, fucking drain me. I don’t know why you haven’t done it already.”

“Don’t worry, little one.” His eyes drift down, along the curve of her throat, up along the slope of her shoulder. Rey squirms under his gaze, all liquid fire. So hot, despite the coolness of his skin. The cold underneath. “I will.” He bares his teeth; she sees the lightning-quick unsheathing of his fangs. “I just know you’re going to be delicious.”

Rey shoves against his hands with all her strength, and it doesn’t budge him an inch.

His smirk grows wider, into something that could be a smile. “Maybe I’ll even turn you,” he says, the threat so light it seems almost like a joke. “So you can see what it’s like to be on the other side of all of this.”

Rey should be afraid. And she is—distantly. Somewhere, buried underneath everything else, she feels that familiar, human flicker of fear. Animal terror.

But it’s buried deep.

Mostly, she feels disappointed.

She didn’t want to die like this. This being: murdered unceremoniously by some third-act mustache-twirling villain.

But it’s looking more and more like that’s the way it’s going to be.

Embarrassing.

It’s this thought that makes her say what she says next.

“Just know,” she manages, panting the words out between huge gulps of air. “Just know—”

She stops, unable to figure out how to go on.

Kylo cocks his head. His crimson eyes glint in the dim light.

“Just know what, sweetheart?” he coos.

“J-just know,” she says again, “that if you turn me—if you do that—I’ll hunt you down.” Kylo keeps smiling at her, nearly indulgently, like a parent would of a rambunctious, attention-seeking child. “I’ll kill you,” she goes on, cursing how tremulous her voice sounds to her own ears. “You know I’ll be able to. All that newborn strength.”

That seems to pull him up short.

After a moment of thought, he shrugs.

“Guess I’ll just have to drain you completely,” he tuts, dry and disdainful. “It’s a pity though. Pretty thing like you only knowing the clumsy touch of your high school lover. I bet he treats you like porcelain.” His fingers adjust on her wrist, eyes flickering to her pulse. He considers the pale curve of bone. “Has no idea how much you can take.”

Rey makes, then, her first mistake.

Or maybe it’s her millionth.

“Yeah, right,” she gasps, gulping down the dryness in her throat, “we’ve never even—”

She stops then. Freezes.

Kylo’s eyes widen, almost imperceptibly. His pupils grow, expanding until his eyes are so dark as to appear completely black, drowning out the red.

He adjusts his position on top of her, pushing his knee higher in between her legs, until his thigh hovers near the seam of her jeans. Rey feels flushed, overheated. Warmer than humans usually do.

She wonders if he can tell; or maybe if it just feels to him like she’s always burning up. That was something Poe had told her—that she feels like fire trapped in skin.

“Are you telling me—” His voice is black velvet, deep and dark and so soft it slips along her body until she shivers with the feeling of it— “that Mr. All-American Baseball hasn’t gotten to taste that sweet little cunt?”

Rey sputters. It was, it seems, the wrong choice. It only makes Kylo’s casual smirk stretch fully into a shit-eating grin.

“You—I—that’s—”

“He hasn’t.” The statement, in his mouth, sounds like a revelation. Something he never knew he wanted, craved. “You’re untouched—”

“So?” she hurls out. “Poe loves me, and I love him, and we’re waiting—”

Kylo laughs. “For what? For marriage?”

Rey stays stubbornly silent.

“You are,” Kylo breathes. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Rey groans. She flexes her hands, open and shut. “Honestly, are you a child? Eat me already.”

“But it’s so much fun to play with my food.” He bends his head, until his mouth is scant inches away from her own. “Little virgin,” he murmurs, gentle and quiet. “Come to play with the big, bad vampire.”

“Don’t get too full of yourself,” she tosses back lightly. “You could have been any random serial killer. You’re not special just because you drink blood. You’re just a fucking sociopath.”

“I drink blood because I have to,” he says. “Not because it brings me pleasure.”

“But it does.”

His lips quirk. “A fortunate side effect.”

“How old are you anyway?”

“Three hundred sixty-seven,” he recites smoothly. “And you?”

“Eighteen.” She has no idea why she answers this question. She just knows, as long as she keeps talking, he keeps listening, and she stays alive. “The typical age of a high school senior, you know.”

His expression practically glows at that information. “Perfect,” he murmurs. “Just perfect.”

Rey growls, baring her teeth again, and she hates how amusing Kylo seems to find this, how it only makes his smile light up that much brighter. “I’m not fucking you,” she hisses. “If that’s where your mind is going.”

“It wasn’t,” he says, clearly lying. “But thanks ever-so-much for thinking of my feelings.”

And suddenly, the weight holding her down is gone. Kylo is off of her, standing at her feet, tall and imposing and so fucking pleased with himself.

His head tilts; he grins. “I’ve decided not to kill you,” he says, magnanimous.

Rey struggles to sit up slightly, still winded, still breathless with that residual, lingering animal fear. “Why not?”

If she were smart, she probably wouldn’t ask. In case he changes his mind. But she’s always been too curious for her own good.

“Because it would be a waste,” he says, slow and deliberate, “to let such a beautiful creature die unfucked.”

Rey scarcely has time to draw a breath to hurl abuse in his face, scarcely even the time to scramble into a fully upright position, when he’s suddenly gone, vanished out of the door to her old ballet studio, the door swinging in his wake.

She blinks, and she is alone again.

Her head falls back on the smooth hardwood floors, making a soft thump of contact.

“Fuck,” she breathes.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She doesn’t know how long she lays there. It could be minutes, or hours. She can’t stop shaking, really, can’t stop her limbs from trembling and quaking. Eventually, she isn’t alone anymore. She hears Poe before she sees him, hears his voice and Finn’s. She feels a pair of strong, cold arms wrap around her torso and drag her up, lifting her off of the ground. She feels the warm heat of the midday sun, and it’s strange—she thought it might have fallen into night.

But it didn’t.

Barely an hour had passed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Cookie, I think you're tame. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yn3Ls5jZ4g)


	2. the lamb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what is THIS another THANK YOU to[ violet ](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) for beta'ing this chapter??? it is!!! she's great!!! thank u :)
> 
> two weeks on the dot hell yeah
> 
> not entirely sure yet if i will be able to update in two weeks but that's what i'll aim for
> 
> if you'd like to know more about updating and also various oneshots i'm writing b/w this u can subscribe 2 me or follow me on twitter @janedazey
> 
> yes i am self-promoting on my own fic what is it to u
> 
> hope u enjoy some more vampire-based horniness

_ You’re still waiting for the running and the screaming, aren’t you? _

** the lamb **

The hospital is cold.

Her father doesn’t like visiting her here, she can tell. Every time he comes, Rey can see him shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Wary and uneasy.

Sometimes she wants to scream at him for it, loud enough that her lungs start to burn, that her vocal chords start to scrape raw. But she doesn’t. She lets him revel in his discomfort.

Hospitals aren’t fun; she knows this.

But he’s not the one who’s in one.

When her father isn’t visiting, her mother is, and that’s almost worse. Her mother frets—asks about Poe, about their relationship. Says things like, if you need me—if you’re not sure—Rey you can always come to—

It’s all bullshit. The words of a mother who is suddenly noticing something must have gone wrong, her litany of questions designed to reassure herself that she did nothing amiss, made no mistakes, rather than check to make sure her own daughter is okay. Rey just smiles and nods and soothes, gentle as a parent.

She knows what it looks like: to be young, and alone, and appear after an extended absence in a hospital, after just ‘breaking up’ with her boyfriend—a performance given to keep her father from following the Dameron clan on their flight out of town. It worked, after all; she should be happy for that. Dad didn’t even try to make her stay.

Whatever. Rey isn’t a battered woman.

Just a little bit worse for the wear.

In the hospital, she watches the bruises from Kylo’s fingers on her neck slowly fade—purple to green to yellow—until they disappear entirely.

And then, it’s like he was never even there at all, even though she knows he was.

Rey is glad for that. She thinks. She’s pretty sure. It makes Poe smile brighter at her, makes him pleased with how well she’s recovering, and that makes Rey happy. Making Poe happy is supposed to—it _does_ make her happy.

(Once, on one of her last days in the hospital, when the color of her skin is almost her own again, Rey traces the outline of the bruises with her index finger. On her legs, hips, neck. Cataloguing where _he_ has been. Each discoloration the shape of his fingers, just like she thought they would be. Watching herself in the mirror, like it is really someone else doing it, Rey presses the heel of her palm into the contusions on her bare waist, making a dent in the soft, warm flesh. The flickers of pain she feels, a dull, distant throbbing, tug at the pit of her stomach. It feels like alchemy: like something that her body will turn into something new.)

Soon, Poe tells her often, they’ll be able to go home. And all of it will be like nothing more than a bad dream.

They go to prom together, she and Poe. He picks her up from her house, slick in his expensive black suit, handsome with his white-toothed smile. He and her father force a few moments of small talk while Rey attempts to do her hair. Her father doesn’t like Poe, she can tell, but neither has he spoken to her about any misgivings he might have. Dad seems to be in this hands-off phase of parenthood called “letting her make her own mistakes.”

As if he hasn’t done just that her whole life. Now, he just pretends like it’s a deliberate choice.

She can hear their voices through the door of their bedroom, low, deep murmuring that mixes in with the loud groan of the air conditioner, a rarely used window unit, employed only on the most blisteringly hot evenings. Forks is suffering through a heat wave—nothing compared to Phoenix, of course, but not quite pleasant either.

Rey is frustrated with her hair, her hands beginning to cramp as she plucks and struggles with strands sticking together while she attempts to hack together a French braid. There are little wisps sticking to her forehead, damp with sweat from her efforts and the heat, even now creeping in from outside. She’s going for something different, something a little more adult than her usual three buns, and it’s just—not—cooperating—

She huffs out a grunt of annoyance, tearing her progress back down, frowning at the halo of frizz near her roots. “Damn,” she mutters, ruffling her fingers through her locks to give it some meager volume. It doesn’t take; her hair remains as flat as ever.

Rey leans closer to her closet mirror, peering at her reflection critically, tracing the bow of her lip to wipe away a smidge of red lipstick that edged onto her skin, gently fluffing the mascara framing her hazel eyes. Her makeup isn’t too bad tonight, though she supposes her eyeliner could use a little work. Rose’s is always so flawless, the wing sharp and pristine. It’s unfair, really, how beautiful Poe’s family is.

Rey isn’t under any misconceptions about her appearance. She knows she’s nice to look at, pretty even, if a little plain and thin. But the Damerons are...unearthly. Eerily perfect, with their deathly pale skin, flawless features, matching amber eyes the result of their vegetarian diet. Rey knows that their looks are the point—that everything about their appearance comes from years of evolution designed to make vampires the unseen, ideal predator. The others, too, the trio from the field with eyes red as the blood they drink, were _overwhelming_ in their beauty.

_Even Kylo Ren._

Rey’s hand slows on her face, fingers stilling along the arch of her brow as she thinks of him. She hasn’t in weeks—too distracted by her brief stint in the hospital, by taking care of her parents, by promising Poe she’d never do anything so impulsive again. The Damerons haven’t found him yet, though she knows Finn and Rose have been looking, chasing Rose’s fleeting visions. Rey already knows anything they can think of to find him will turn up as a dead-end; he’s not going to let them catch him unawares.

 _He’s too smart for that,_ she decides. _Too quick._ She considers the gleam in his eyes as he assessed her, his gaze hungry and focused, as if he were surveying a particularly fine cut of meat.

Poe told her, when she first realized what he is, how careful vampires need to be with humans. How careful he needs to be with her. 

“The smallest mistake, the slightest error—” He shook his head. “If I’m not paying attention, I could hurt you so easily. Reach a hand up to stroke your hair and—crush your skull. Entirely on accident.” His voice was tortured, eyes filled with misery. Rey was struck with the thought of how handsome Poe looked, square-jawed and serious. 

He said, “You have no idea how _fragile_ you are.”

Rey mumbled a quiet agreement with what he said. Privately, in her own head, the one Poe couldn’t read, she thought it was a bit much.

She thinks, now, of Kylo Ren. Those eyes of his, red and dark as pooling blood, set under a strong brow. His pitch-black hair, waving over his head, not a single one out of place, perfect enough to unsettle. His mouth, full and pink lips, a flash of ivory fangs. His dense musculature, hands the size of oars. The way he held his body like a weapon. Which, she supposes, it is.

He could have slaughtered her. It would have been easy for him to do it: the quick and merciless swatting of a fly. He could have snapped her neck cleanly, fast enough that it wouldn’t even hurt. Or, she muses, he could have gone straight for the main course, sunk his teeth into the soft skin of her neck, inner wrists, the flesh of her thighs. His kind like their prey _fresh,_ Poe told her. Alive if they can swing it. Most kills, especially for younger vampires, are accidental, like a child stuffing his face with food, unaware of how much he has yet taken from his plate.

Kylo wasn’t like that. Rey knows this. His hold on her, the clutch of his grip, was careful. He knew exactly how deep to press, how much her human body could take. He could have drained pints of her blood like a man counting drinks, just enough to sate his thirst. Suddenly, she pictures it: his body curled around hers, back to his chest, an embrace that could be mistaken for loving. Lips on her skin, fangs threatening. A hand, giant and implacable, around her throat.

In the mirror, she sees a blush paint the apples of her cheeks.

Not for the first time, Rey is thankful Poe’s “talent” doesn’t work on her.

She sighs, heavy, raising her arms again to fiddle with the light strands around her temples, trying to curl them around her finger, when she notices, all at once, the startling absence of sound.

Dead quiet.

Her eyes slide across the mirror, attention fixing on the reflection of her window, on the hemlock tree that Poe climbs sometimes, when he visits her at night. One of the branches still scrapes the glass when the wind blows hard, like a fist gently knocking, and Rey has seen it hold Poe’s weight as he crouches beside her room, waiting politely to be let inside. Vampires don’t need to be granted permission to enter a home; they can come and claim whatever they want, whenever they want. No crosses will sway them, not mirrors or silver or garlic. They must be torn apart, pieces set ablaze until nothing remains but ash.

Her chest rises and falls shallowly, breath caught in her lungs. Something prickles the back of her neck, something like— _eyes_ watching—

“Rey?”

Poe’s voice comes suddenly, just behind her door. Rey jumps at the sound, whipping her head around, strands of hair sticking to her glossy lips.

She clears her throat, eyes fluttering closed and open again. “Just a minute,” she calls.

Rey brushes her palms, quick, over her hair, smoothing it, and then sighs as she pulls out an elastic to tie half of it up, leaving the rest to curl softly around her freckled shoulders.

So Poe takes her to her last high school dance.

They dance. They hug their friends. Rey underage drinks, Jessika Pava sly as she palms Rey a silver, rank-smelling flask. Poe frowns when he sees her lift it to her mouth to drink, but he says nothing. It’s important for her to have these experiences, he has told her before, a martyr in his love for her, utterly unselfish. He would never take away those growing experiences, even if he doesn’t entirely approve of them.

Rey is glad he doesn’t bring up the other thing he’s always disapproving of. The conversation about turning her has been, for now, shelved. Indefinitely, it seems. And she doesn’t want to ruin their night bringing it up. She clenches her jaw, tipping the flask to spill a mouthful of vodka down her parched throat, and smiles at her doting boyfriend as he politely declines all food and drink.

They have, like, tons of fun. 

Rey has so much fun.

She barely even feels it: the eyes she thinks— _knows_ are there. All red and black and wide. Starving and bigger than dinner plates.

“Where do you think he went?”

Rey asks the question that’s been on the tip of her tongue for weeks that night, during a lull in their pleasant conversation. Debussy floats through the air while she and Poe lay together on her rickety bed, tinny and quiet through the speakers of her laptop. She knows Poe prefers it on his record player at his home, the sprawling Dameron mansion where everything is clean and sharp and free of dust, floor-to-ceiling windows and an unused kitchen. Poe bought himself a bed, a four-poster one, just for the nights she stays over, when she tells her dad she’s really at Jessika’s. He hasn’t needed one, he said, for almost a hundred years. Rey thought it was so romantic, if a little extravagant. 

She is beginning to hate Debussy.

Poe’s brow furrows, the corners of his mouth pulling up in confusion. “Where do I think who went?”

Her cheeks burn, and she doesn’t quite know why. “Kylo Ren,” she says, trying to sound cool, dismissive. Uncaring of the answer.

Poe shrugs, his thumb stroking a truncated path on her freckled shoulder.

“Back to hunting,” he murmurs. “He lives for it, you know.” He cocks his head, considering this, still tracing a soothing pattern over her skin with his thumb. He’s always so _gentle_ with her. “It’s his one true joy in life. Tracking something until he gets close enough to kill it.”

There must be something in her face, some expression that worries Poe (he is always so worried) because he shifts his position on the bed, the ancient headboard groaning in protest as it thumps against the wall. “We’ll find him, Rey,” he vows, tawny eyes serious. “I promise, he’s not going to hurt you again.”

Rey furrows her brow. Before she can think better of it, she blurts out, “He didn’t hurt me.”

Her boyfriend blinks. “Pardon?”

“I mean,” she amends, hasty, “it could have been a lot worse than a few bumps and bruises. It was nothing really.”

“Rey.” His voice is stern, dipping into that lecturing tone that makes her want to roll her eyes more often than not. She barely manages to avoid doing it as he goes on, “I’d hardly call what that psychopath did to you ‘nothing.’ And who’s to say he won’t try again?”

“But I’m fine, Poe. And Rose hasn’t seen him coming back for me, and Jannah and Kaydel have been checking on the borders every single night, and you’ve been—” she sighs, a tiny sound that she knows won’t escape his notice, “keeping an eye on me at home and school. I doubt anything is going to happen.”

“Of course not. I won’t let it,” he promises earnestly. Rey is struck with the sudden realization that Poe looks at her the way she’d look at a stray cat: as something small and soft, needing protection.

She shakes her head, as if to rid herself of the thought, and grins. “Don’t worry, Poe. I’m safe as houses.”

“Houses fall down,” he mumbles, petulant.

This time, Rey shows him the dramatic lift of her eyes to the ceiling. “I’m not afraid of big, bad Kylo Ren.” Her tone is playful, hiding the annoyance she feels underneath. Rey doesn’t know why it should irritate her, Poe’s protectiveness. It’s one of the reasons why she loves him.

But he doesn’t appreciate her light-heartedness about her most recent near-death experience. In fact, her words only seem to make him more upset, his jaw tightening, lips pressing into a thin, flat line. “You _should_ be afraid of him,” he says. “You should be afraid of all of us. Don’t you have any sense of self-preservation at all?”

Blood rushes to Rey’s face, warming her cheeks with a flush of anger. Poe’s pupils dilate at the sight, his breathing slow as he struggles to control his reaction to her scent. He would hate, he told her once, to frighten her. 

_I bet he treats you like porcelain._

She manages to keep her voice even when she replies, “I’ve survived this long without getting myself killed. I think I can handle my own life just fine, Poe.”

He scoffs. “You’ve been lucky.”

“I’ve been smart,” she corrects hotly. “Give me a little bit of credit here. Didn’t I talk him into letting me go?”

For a moment, Poe glares at her, his expression hard and skeptical. Slowly, his eyes soften, and he releases his breath in a soft whisper. Reluctantly, he admits, “You did.”

Rey smiles reassuringly. “So, just. Trust me. Okay?”

He nods, granting her a small smile in return. “I know I can trust you.”

She grins wider and tucks herself into her boyfriend’s side, nestling closer, pleased with his unexpected concession. “Okay.” She cranes her neck back to look up at his face. “Can we make out now?”

Poe huffs out a laugh, face cracking into that handsome smile she adores. It almost makes her forget about why she was upset in the first place. “‘Make out.’ I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that particular vernacular.”

“ _Well_ ,” she draws out the word, stretching it exaggeratedly long, “can we?”

“Yes, of course.” Poe presses a kiss to her temple, the most gentle little touch. “Anything for my Rey of light.”

His eyes are already closed when she frowns at the strangely patronizing nickname, and his lips are right there, so Rey decides to let it go. After all, she figures, in the grand scheme of their love story, what does it matter if Poe calls her ‘his ray of light’ without asking if she likes it? Why should it bother her, really?

She’s his after all. Isn’t she?

Rey closes her eyes and leans into his kiss.

Poe’s lips are soft against hers, plush and giving. He’s a good kisser. It’s all they’ve ever done, so Rey supposes it’s good that he’s so good at it. It’s a good kiss, and Poe is a good boyfriend, and she’s happy.

She sits back on her heels, shifting her position until she can clamber closer, pressing her chest into his. He’s only a bit taller than her, so their bodies align almost perfectly, and she can hear his sharp intake of breath when her thighs open to perch her body on his lap. Poe is cold, hard as marble. His arms around her waist hold her a delicate distance away, but Rey is stubborn. She loves him, and they’ll fit. She can make herself fit with him.

It’s prom night.

She gets as far as opening her mouth for him, tracing the seam of his lips with her tongue, when he pulls away with a gasp.

“Rey,” he says, firm and no-nonsense. “That’s enough.”

She wriggles closer, trying to match their hips together, trying to tempt him into giving up some of his more puritanical sensibilities, but he doesn’t give her a single inch. She sighs, listening to her own voice whining, “Just a little more. Maybe you could—”

She hesitates, trying to think of a different way to phrase ‘second base.’ Even without being able to read her mind, he seems to know which direction it’s going.

Poe smiles at her. Fond. Indulgent. “Not tonight,” he says gently.

_It would be a waste to let such a beautiful creature die unfucked._

Heat floods her body, her face flushing red. From anger or something else, she can’t quite tell.

“When?” she bites out, voice hard.

He fingers the tips of her hair, rubbing them between his thumb and index. “When it’s the right time,” he tells her, tone brooking no argument.

Rey clenches her jaw tight. She forces a smile as Poe leans in close, nosing her temple to lay a kiss on her forehead. It’s fine, she decides. He’s only looking out for her.

She loves him for that.

There is something inside her that still hasn’t settled.

Poe is long since gone. Patted her on the head, pecked her on the lips, and sent her off to bed. Her little human body needs its eight hours, and he’d hate to keep her up. On occasion, he might stop by the house near dawn, just to check up on her, but otherwise he leaves her with plenty of privacy. Plenty of time alone, to sleep soundly and dream lovely human dreams.

Only Rey can’t sleep.

She lays on her back, eyes tracing the glow-in-the-dark stars her father put up on the ceiling when she was a kid, visiting him for a week here or there. They mean nothing to her, those stars. Remnants of a childhood interest she’s never had.

The branch outside her window brushes the glass. She turns onto her side, and the bed creaks, too. 

Her heart pounds, loud and quick as any warm-blooded animal. She can’t stop thinking of it. She doesn’t even really know what _it_ is, that she’s thinking of. Something that’s never happened: a body holding her down. Arms strong, wrapped around her stomach like a python. A hand on her neck, mouth behind her ear. Someone who won’t hold her like a piece of fine China, held behind glass, terrified it might up and break.

Her eyes flutter closed as she fits the heel of her palm between her legs. She rocks against it, her thin cotton underwear doing little to muffle the sensation, mouth dry, breath caught in her throat. Poe is miles away, far enough that he’d never know, never hear the way her blood pumps faster, the quickening of her pulse. He can’t read her mind anyway. What he can’t know won’t hurt him.

It’s with this thought that Rey lets herself picture _him_. The feeling of his hands on her stomach, his fangs unsheathed, the rumble of his voice like an earthquake. A natural disaster, she thinks, shifting her hips to press her hand closer.

Outside, the wind blows harder, scraping the tree branch against her window, again and again, back and forth. Rhythmic. Kylo holding her down, Kylo spreading her open, Kylo _inside_ her, desperate to eat her alive—

Rey turns over onto her back and peels the elastic of her underwear up, fitting her fingers back inside. She’s wet, almost uncomfortably so, the fabric of her panties sticking to slick skin. She imagines, for a moment, what she must look like, what Kylo would see if he was just outside the window, crouching in the tree. Wanton and flushed, all that warm blood under her skin, sleep shirt hitched up and legs open and wide, laid out on her twin bed like a feast, waiting for him to dig in.

Her orgasm, when it comes, is stronger than usual, ripping through her in a way that’s almost like pain, sending shivering aftershocks of pleasure through her limbs. She comes and comes and _comes_ , steady pulses of heat pulling through her body, fingers working herself through it. Her mouth opens, but she doesn’t let a single sound escape.

When she finally opens her eyes, her shoulders still shaking, struggling to even out her breath, her gaze flickers instantly to the window, as if checking to see who might be there watching. But there’s no one there. Only the slightest crack between the glass and the sill, a space she leaves to fit her fingers in, so that she can open her window wide and let someone in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ My baby loves me; I'm so hungry. Hunger makes me a modern girl. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptk7DEYY6LA)


	3. the bad guy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again to [ violet ](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) for beta'ing this chapter!!!!!!
> 
> one day late but u know who's counting really
> 
> u can follow me on twitter @janedazey check me OUT
> 
> i added a tag for voyeurism bc it feels appropriate wrt last chapter and this one!!!! nothing that twilight hasn't done before though lmao

_Do I dazzle you? _

** the bad guy **

Rey graduates, and it’s nothing all too special. Poe and his family have all done it about a million times.

Forks High School’s graduating class this year has one hundred thirty-four seniors, with an eight percent dropout rate, an improvement over last year’s whopping twelve percent.

Poe can’t stop telling her how _proud_ he is.

“It’s just high school.”

Rey tells him this after the ceremony, after they’ve both walked the stage in the gymnasium. Finn and Rose are standing with them, steadfastly ignoring the looks of judgment from the other students at the way their arms are wrapped around each other—the weirdo foster kids who all live in the same house, who all date each other. _The Dameron cult_ , Jessika Pava whispered when Rey started sitting with them at lunch, the creepy, incestuous Dameron cult with their perfect faces and bi-monthly camping trips that aren’t really camping trips, not that anyone knows this but Rey. And how sad, that poor new girl got sucked in; those groups always target vulnerable, impressionable, young girls.

Poe gives her a semi-stern look, amused eyes set under a furrowed brow. “It’s a big deal,” he says. “You did a great thing, a hard thing, and you deserve to celebrate it!”

Rose joins in, boundlessly enthusiastic for all things charmingly human, which Rey, naturally, is. “Party time,” she crows, “time to party!”

The corners of Rey’s mouth tip up in the beginning of a wan smile.

She doesn’t like parties, really. Or to be treated like a big deal. Even as a child, she took no small amount of offense at those bright, joyful teachers who spoke in animated, exaggerated voices, who freely gave out gold stars and treasure box toys at the littlest accomplishments. Always to the kids who _needed more attention_ , who _persevered_ , who _participated_ and _tried their best_ and got middling grades and never won any real prizes.

But she loves Poe, and her mother taught her how to be gracious when given an unasked for gift, how to smile at t-shirts two sizes too small and Target clearance rack science experiment kits marked for ages five-to-seven.

“Sure,” she says. Don’t be ungrateful. “Sounds fun.” It doesn’t.

Poe grins, wide and easy. He throws his arm possessively around her shoulder and kisses her on the temple.

After a moment, Rey leans into his embrace. Threads her fingers with the hand hanging loose in front of her chest.

“Just—something small,” she says, trying to maintain her smile. She’s being a good sport. She’s being gracious. “Okay?”

Her boyfriend’s eyes soften. Rey is struck with a sudden desperate thought, one she knows he won’t be able to hear: _Don’t call me Rey of light_.

“Of course,” he replies gently.

It isn’t something small.

Practically the entire senior class shows up, plus some juniors and kids home for the summer from college, all of them eager to glimpse the Dameron mansion out at the very edge of the town borders, to explore the place that no one has been invited to before.

No one except for her, of course.

Even with Shara and Kes there, underage drinking abounds. It’s too loud, too exuberant, packed full of teenage bodies dancing to eardrum-shattering music, eating every single piece of untouched food on the kitchen counters that the family never uses, playing tonsil hockey (and, Rey assumes, more besides) in every bedroom (each of which has now been equipped with an unnecessary, just-for-show frame and mattress). The house feels cramped despite its size, infested in every nook and cranny with oversized, overeager high school graduates. Like mice, swarming.

Rey hates it.

She _hates_ it.

She can’t even put on a brave face. By ten o’clock Rey is _done_ —with Kaydel begging her to do shots (“I wish I could still get drunk,” she moans) and Finn pulling her into a bear-hug every single time he sees her (“Sorry, peanut,” he says the third time, “I’m just so excited for you!”) and Poe steering her clear of anything that might be a little bit too dangerous (up to and including the sharp edges of the dining room table that Rey was about to bump into, as if she were an actual child and not just being treated like one).

She slips away after the cake is cut ( _CONGRATS GRAD!_ it proclaims in pink royal icing), figuring she can take a half hour to herself to regroup, to relax, to be alone and have some peace and quiet.

 _Something small._ _Right_ , she thinks scornfully as she climbs the stairs to the second floor, slipping away from the noise and the heat of bodies packed tightly together. _Something small_ her fucking ass _._

Poe is a great boyfriend. Rey knows this. Any girl would feel lucky to be driven around in a Porsche, or to be taken to the nicest restaurants, or to be given a diamond bracelet for her birthday. Who cares if Rey doesn’t particularly like flashy things, or if jewelry like that will catch on the machines in shop, the only class that Rey openly and freely enjoys going to? She wore the damn bracelet, didn’t she? She smiled and thanked him and kissed him on the cheek. She told his clan how wonderful he was, and she thanked them for treating her so well, for treating her like family, like gold.

Her mother taught her to be gracious; she’s being gracious. 

She just needs a minute to herself.

Poe’s bedroom occupants are too busy to notice Rey as she speed-walks past the bed—she’ll have to remind him to wash his sheets—and it’s only another minute to crack his window, shimmy along the vine-covered trellis splashed across the side of the house, and clamber up the gutter until she reaches a landing on the side of the house, a little space that Poe showed her all those months ago, the day he told her how much he loved her.

After she pulls her body, grunting, over the flat edge, Rey is, at last, blissfully alone.

For the first time all night, she breathes.

It’s a beautiful evening: the sky darkened to a deep, fathomless blue, the wind rolling ceaselessly through the trees. Way out in the woods like this, Rey can see more than a few stars when she lays back to stare up at the sky overhead. The gravel crunches under her body, tiny rocks cracking and bumping together as she settles back. Her eyes leap up, tracing the stars without blinking, the sound of crickets chirping filling her ears until it drowns out the sound from the party below.

Once she’s a vampire, she’ll have all the time in the world for things like this. Go places where she can see a million stars or more, the sight unfettered by human civilization; she could hold her breath and sink to the bottom of the ocean, climb up Everest without fear of frostbite, spend hours watching the wavering ridge of the Aurora Borealis. Stay up all night, and read all day, and learn every little thing she wants to without being bound to it. Without being tethered to _any_ of it—this town or Phoenix or her parents or—or—

Rey used to spend a lot of time alone as a child. Hopping from school to school as her mother hopped them from apartment to apartment, hopped herself from man to man—it was hard to make friends. Easier to dig up her roots if she didn’t let them grow, after all. She grew accustomed to it, loneliness. It was an acquired taste: going down bitter until one day it didn’t.

Forks is the first place she’s ever tried to really make friends. Be close to people. She should be with them now, she thinks. With her boyfriend. It’s a bad habit, this self-imposed exile, the kind that always made her mother sigh— _don’t you want to go out with your girlfriends? talk to cute boys?_ —one she’s already supposed to have kicked.

It should feel _bad_ , sitting up on the roof alone while the graduation party her boyfriend threw just for her sake carries on under her feet, without the guest of honor.

Instead, Rey feels nothing so much as— _relief_.

The moment she realizes it, her stomach churns, something too close to guilt flooding through her. Her eyes slam shut, jaw tightening. She’s not relieved. She’s happy— _happy_ —and in love and good and surrounded by her friends. She is going to go back downstairs and have _fun_ , she decides, and then, sensing that’s not a strong enough promise to make just in her head, Rey whispers aloud, “I am going to go back downstairs and have _fun._ ”

And, with that decision made, her eyes snap open. She sits up, feet still dangling over the ledge. Her fist bangs down against the gravel for emphasis.

The first thing she notices is the crickets have stopped chirping. Even the wind seems to stand still, frightened to rustle through the trees.

And it’s that... _feeling_ again. That _eyes on the back of her neck_ sensation. Her skin prickling, upper arms erupting into goosebumps, face flushing hot.

Her mouth moves in the shape of his name, but no sound can be pulled from her throat.

“ _Kylo_?”

For a moment, she waits. Almost expecting him to pop up in front of her, hovering in the air like she knows he can’t, some leftover idea from a cheesy horror movie. Almost expecting to hear his voice, dark as pitch and velvet-soft in her ear; she can imagine the curl of his lip, chin dripping with blood, as he’d sigh, _miss me, pet?_ Crimson eyes blazing, filled with some hunger she couldn’t even dream of.

Eventually, the feeling fades. Passes by itself, slow and churning as a ship at sea. Rey releases her breath in one long sigh. She bats her hair out of her eyes, hoping it doesn’t look too much like she was laying down in a bed of rocks. Wouldn’t want anyone to worry.

She climbs down from the rooftop without glancing behind her.

She already knows there wouldn’t be anyone there if she checked.

Table Six is weird. That’s the general consensus between the line cooks and the other waitress on shift this morning.

When Rey gets back from her break—fifteen minutes spent in the alley behind Maz’s scrolling mindlessly through her phone, replying to messages Poe sent her during the first half of her shift (work is boring; she and Jessika are going to Port Angeles to shop this weekend; yes she misses him; she hopes he has lots of fun “camping” wink wink nudge nudge)—table six’s strange, singular occupant is the talk of the kitchen.

Table Six is clearly new to the area, but he was deeply uninterested (downright hostile about it, really) in making small talk with anyone about where he’s from. Table Six ordered a coffee, black, and refused a menu. Table Six has been sitting in his chair without anything to distract him, not a phone or a book or a fucking typewriter, but he seems far from bored with the lack of stimulation. If anything, he seems to find the entire diner an object of fascination—probably one of those asshole guys from Seattle who thinks Forks is so _charming_ and _down-to-earth_ and wants to move here to _get back to his roots_ (cue the beginning of gentrification and the setting up of a Cheesecake Factory and the death of the Forks they know and love). Table Six has taken only three sips of his coffee in the ten minutes since he’s been seated and had it delivered to him.

Most damning of all: Table Six has—in short—a decidedly _weird_ energy. 

“He’s all yours.” Tallie informs Rey of this fact with a half-shrug, mouth tilted at an angle that seems to gently suggest an apology but makes no promises on its sincerity. “You drew the short straw.”

Rey groans, arms falling lank against her sides because why, exactly, did she insist to her father and Poe that she needed to work the summer before college? Some crock of shit about needing to figure out her financial independence, give herself something to do, maybe earn a little extra to save before moving into the dorms at UW?

And this is how the universe repays her: with the weirdo at table six and a completely unsympathetic wave from Tallie Lintra.

Rey ties her apron back on, checks to make sure she’s still got a pad and pen tucked neatly into the pocket, and plasters on a smile as she pushes through the kitchen’s OUT door.

She barely makes it two feet before her legs abruptly cease functioning. Rey opens her mouth and closes it again, looking for all the world, she’s sure, like a fish gasping for water after being dragged unceremoniously ashore. Her heartbeat picks up speed like a fast car, pumping all her ostensibly tempting blood through her body like she is holding a competition with herself for how much more dangerous she can make this current situation.

Because there’s a vampire sitting in the middle of Maz’s Diner.

And he is looking right at her.

Rey stares. And stares. Eyes, she’s sure, bugging unattractively out of her head. Jaw working, swallowing reflexive.

Again, her mouth moves, but no sound can be pulled from her throat.

Kylo greets her like an old friend: with a wave and a smile.

“Rey,” he calls, voice overly bright and cheery. His smile is easy, charming. Rey is blisteringly aware of the people around them, patrons of the diner tucking into their breakfasts with blithe ignorance at the predator in their midsts.

If he had the vaguest inclination, she knows, every person in this building could be dead in less than a minute.

She forces her legs forward, heart thumping loud and uncontrolled. Her body feels too hot, temperature rising with every passing second.

When she reaches the table, Kylo smiles wider, sharp canines bared like a wolf.

“How long has it been?” he asks lightly.

Rey glares, molars grinding. Every word drops like lead from between her teeth. “What are you doing here?”

He whistles low, chuckling. “It’s all straight to business with you humans, isn’t it?” He tsks, shaking his head in visible and gently amused affection. “What happened to small talk? Taking the scenic route?”

“We have no business,” Rey hisses. Her eyes flicker around the dining room, clocking a family of four near the windows, a couple seated a few tables away, an elderly man drinking coffee with his eggs and toast at the counter. How quickly could he mow them down? Would it even matter if she warned them? More likely he’d snap her neck before she could work up the energy to scream.

But that’s not quite right, she realizes. Kylo had the chance to kill her before, more than a month ago now. Rey breathes, willing herself to calm. He won’t do anything to harm her now; she’d bet her life on it.

She is, of course. Betting her life.

She should be more afraid about that. Her heart should be pounding with fear, nothing else. Not this thing that seems perilously close to excitement.

Her pad is pulled from her pocket, pen twirling nervously between her fingers. Rey stares down at the blank white paper, trying to think of nothing at all. Trying her best not to remember what she did the night before, straddling her pillow at almost three in the morning.

Kylo drums his fingers on the beige laminate of the table, nails clicking. 

“Our ‘business,’” she goes on, voice dipping low and hard, carefully steady, “if you really want to call it that, is long since finished.”

“I don’t recall agreeing to those terms.”

“You didn’t need to. You’re not _welcome_ here.”

Kylo cocks his head. He doesn’t lose an inch of that serene expression, even as his eyebrows tilt together with fondness at her weak human protestations. “Says who? Your baby vampire?”

“Says me,” she grinds out, and repeats, edging nearer to his table, “What are you doing here?”

“Well, let’s see—” His fingers steeple, like he’s really thinking through the answer, and wow, what a pretentious prick; are all vampires this annoying? “My story begins way back in the seventeenth century—”

Rey scowls, arms folding, forgotten notepad dangling from her hand. “No, asshole. What are you doing at Maz’s?”

“I’m in the area. Thought I’d take in some of the...local culture.” He makes a show of peering around the diner, mocking judgment obvious on his patrician features. His lips curl, as do Rey’s fingers, closing her hand into a fist. “As it were,” he adds, snide.

Her blood boils. She stammers, too worked up to speak properly. “You just—I’m going to—when Poe gets back he is—so just a BLT for you?” Rey pins on a wide, fake grin when she belatedly notices Tallie behind her, sidling up to the table. “Extra bacon?”

Kylo doesn’t take his eyes off Rey, not even acknowledging the presence of anyone else. “As raw as you can make it.”

She can practically sense Tallie eyeing Kylo, even without looking to make sure. Rey scrawls the fake order down, stabbing her pen with perhaps slightly too much intensity. “So extra crispy. Anything else?”

“Just the pleasure of your company.” His voice is smooth, rich and deep. Beside Rey, Tallie watches the interaction, hip cocked coquettishly in the vampire’s direction. _So much for steering clear of the table six weirdo._

“Rey,” she says, higher pitched and more giggly than usual, “Do you, like, _know_ this guy?”

The unnatural stress the other girl puts on the word makes something twist in the pit of Rey’s stomach. Rey resists the urge to glare, feeling—absurdly—territorial. “Oh, he’s just—”

“I’m an old friend from back home,” Kylo supplies. His eyes shift, almost reluctantly, over to the new arrival. “Visiting.”

Tallie, blissfully unaware of the danger sitting in the middle of the breakfast ‘rush,’ grants him a dazzling grin. Rey bristles. She doesn’t know if she wants to push Tallie away for the other girl’s own safety or because she’s clearly trying to flirt with Rey’s centuries old vampire nemesis. Either way, Rey wants her gone.

“Fun!” Tallie exclaims. “You must love getting all that sun down in Phoenix.” She barely pauses long enough for Kylo to nod noncommittally. “When I get to Florida the first thing I’m doing is working on my tan. How long are you in town for?”

“Not long,” Rey hurries to reply, even as Kylo rumbles, “Indefinitely.”

Tallie’s eyebrows shoot up. Rey cringes, watching the gears grind and shift in her head. After a long moment, Tallie’s face lights up in apparent understanding. “Do you want to sit down and catch up for a minute?”

“No, Tallie, you don’t need to—”

Tallie hip-checks her, startling Rey into silence. “It’s fine! All your tables have their food. I’ll just keep an eye on things and holler when I need you.”

Kylo’s teeth click as he smiles. “How generous.”

“Yes,” Rey grits out, sitting down as Tallie practically shoves her bodily into the chair across from Kylo. She lays her notepad down on the table, trying not to snarl at the other waitress leaning down to peel Kylo’s ‘order’ off the top. “Thank you, Tallie.”

“No problemo.”

Tallie leans close before she goes, grin conspiratorial and eyes meaningful. Her whisper would probably be low enough if present company weren’t equipped with super senses. As it is, Rey is agonizingly aware that Kylo can hear every single word. “You don’t have to worry about Poe, Rey,” she assures. “I won’t tell a soul.”

She straightens up again, oblivious to Rey’s furious blush as much as Kylo’s shit-eating grin. “I’ll leave you to it,” she says, and flounces away.

Rey curls and uncurls her fingers. It takes her a long moment to steady her breathing enough to look back across the table. When she does at long last, she is greeted with the sight of an irritatingly self-satisfied vampire, white teeth gleaming and full lips quirked.

“Why are you here?” she mutters darkly. 

It does nothing to wipe that annoying expression off his stupid, flawless face. “Can’t a vampire stop by to see how his favorite mortal is doing?”

“This is—you are—you—” Rey huffs, frustrated and pissed at how smug Kylo is about it. “You already let me _go_.”

“I let you _live_ ,” he corrects flippantly. His eyes rake over her; he doesn’t even make a cursory attempt to hide it. “You really think I’d let go of a delicious little morsel like you?”

Rey blinks. Her stomach swoops, like the feeling she gets at the top of a roller-coaster: fear tinged with jittery pleasure. Or the other way around. “What do you want from me?”

“Just the pleasure of your company, pet.” His lips twitch into a smirk, and Rey stifles the shiver that threatens up her spine. He licks his lips and adds, quiet and laden with intent, “For now.”

Rey snarls, index finger pointed accusingly, “If you touch me or anyone else in this town—”

He scoffs, eyes rolling to the ceiling. “Relax.” He drags the word out, drawing two syllables into far more. “I’m not hunting in town limits. As a courtesy to you, of course.”

“Oh, how gracious,” she bites out.

“I rather think so,” he volleys back, and then, almost immediately, he changes tack. “I see your boy still hasn’t turned you.” His head tips back, eyes half-lidded, appraising her the way he would something up for auction. “You want him to. Correct?”

It’s not a question, the way he says it. He just wants her to confirm something he already knows is true.

Rey blanches. Something clenches tight around her heart, squeezing like a fist. “It’s—I don’t—we’re waiting.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. For marriage.” His eyes flicker down her body, lingering on the hollow of her throat, where her collar parts, revealing inches of tan skin. Between them, the coffee is cooling in its white mug, almost untouched. “Because that’s your plan,” he continues. “Settling down with your high school boyfriend and redoing high school for the rest of your eternity?”

“No. _No_.” The embarrassment in her own voice embarrasses her more than anything else; as if his opinion means _anything_ to her. Rey shifts, the vinyl-covered cushion of the chair squeaking underneath her. “I’m going to college in the fall.”

He smirks. “Dream big.”

“Oh, _fuck_ you,” Rey growls, and, all at once, Kylo’s expression alights, lips parting in what appears to be a genuinely delighted smile. She watches, confused, as he laughs, fitting his pointed chin into the cup of his palm. 

“I’m so glad you’ve lived up to my memory.” He clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth and shakes his head in indulgent and obvious affection. “Little spitfire. You know, I’ve been trying to puzzle it out.”

“Puzzle what out?”

Crimson flashes as his eyes dart to her mouth. “What makes you so enticing,” he murmurs, voice rolling off his tongue satin-soft. “Has your little boyfriend—”

“Poe—” she corrects lamely, and he ignores her, plowing ahead.

“Whatever. What’s his theory?”

“I don’t understand why—why do you think I’m so special?” In her lap, her hands fidget, fingers twisting and untwisting. Distantly, she’s aware of where she is, the inherent threat of who she’s with. But that’s only distantly. “There’s nothing special about me.”

Leaning in close, blood-red eyes sharp as the edge of a knife, he says, “Yes, there is.” He takes a moment to let his words settle, sink in, before going on. “Do you see any other humans walking around with vampires trailing after them like dogs on a leash?”

Her mouth feels dry. “Are you on my leash?”

Kylo pointedly ignores her question, but he doesn’t look away. Almost like he’s in her thrall. But Rey thinks maybe that goes both ways; she’s rooted to her spot. She couldn’t leave, even if she wanted to.

She clears her throat, and it breaks the moment, whatever it is. His shoulders heave, as if he were taking a long held breath. He doesn’t need to breathe, she knows. An instinct, Rose told her once, that doesn’t go away. Kylo’s been dead for longer than he’d been alive, she knows, and he still can’t seem to rid himself of that vestigial remnant of his humanity. “Poe did say he likes the way I smell.” A bark of nervous laughter bubbles out of her throat. “God, that’s so weird to say.”

Kylo doesn’t even blink. His pupils seem to grow by a fraction. But it may just be a trick of the light. “Your scent is...tempting.”

Rey nods, feigning nonchalance she doesn’t feel. Just a regular day at work, discussing her human smell with the vampire who tried to eat her a month ago. As one does. “Like strawberries,” she supplies, recalling how Poe first described her scent.

But the words have barely left her mouth before Kylo interrupts, “No. It’s like honey. And sex.” Under the table, Rey squeezes her thighs together, bare skin rubbing tortuously slow. A muscle in his jaw jumps; his eyes darken visibly, eclipsing the red. “Have you been thinking about me, Rey?”

She can’t breathe. “I—”

“Because I’ve been thinking about you. _Often_.” His voice dips, a hush. Even the quiet din of the room around them seems to fade as Kylo speaks. As he stares at her with open hunger. “You stick in my mind. I keep remembering how you felt underneath me. All warm and tender. The smell of your arousal—”

She chokes, sputters, “I wasn’t—”

“You can’t hide it from me, little one,” he says, almost gentle. “Just like you can’t hide it now.” His eyes trail down her body, dragging. She can feel them on her like fingertips. “Such a lovely flush on your cheeks.” His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “Your neck. I wonder how far down that goes.”

“I’m not—”

“You’ve been thinking of me, too, haven’t you, pet? At night, after your boyfriend goes home.” He coos the words softly, oh-so-sweetly, filth easing from his mouth like stanzas of a love poem. Rey sits, frozen, every syllable drawing her body tighter and tighter until she feels she might break from it. “When you close your eyes and slip your fingers in your little panties, feel yourself get all sticky-hot. You think of me, don’t you, love. How I could pin you down and lick that sweet place between your thighs until you _scream_ —”

Her hand slams on the table before she can process it, napkin-wrapped silverware leaping. “How the fuck did you know about that?” she hisses. She thinks of the tree outside her window, the way she’s been leaving it cracked open. How she’s been writhing around on her sheets with her fingers slick in her cunt and oversized t-shirts pulled up to her shoulders. Has he been watching her? 

Rey thinks she should be sick to her stomach at the thought. Instead, something in her flutters wildly, thrills.

Kylo doesn’t even flinch. His eyes glitter, triumphant. “Because you just told me.” Her mouth falls open, and his knuckles turn white where he’s gripping the side of the table. She hadn’t even noticed it, but she can see now the imprint of his fingers, hard plastic crumpling under his strength. “How many times have you made yourself come thinking of me? Don’t you want to try the real thing?”

Rey can’t speak. She barely manages his name, “Kylo,” and it isn’t enough. For him or for herself.

Carefully, his fingers unpeel from the table. Sure enough, there are grooves where he pressed deep, cracks stretching in the laminate and reaching across the length of the table. 

He’s having a hard time controlling himself, she realizes. With how much he wants her.

The feeling is heady, dizzying. It makes the world around her seem faded and fuzzy, like she’s drunk. Intoxicated at his presence, at the look in his eyes. At how he stares at her like she’s so desperately desired.

Her legs cross, muscles tightening. An image flashes through her mind, that same one she thinks of each night, of Kylo holding her up, palm to her sternum, lips grazing the side of her throat. Only this time, as she sees it, she imagines something else: her own hand, slipping up his arm, reaching behind to curl her fingers around the back of his neck and twine through pitch-black hair.

Kylo fits one hand inside the other, knuckles cracking as he presses them together. He takes a shuddering breath, incisors seeming sharper than usual, his smile forced into casual indifference. 

“Oh, Rey.” His tone is overly breezy, light as air. Rey doesn’t buy one bit of it. “I can wait. I’ve been waiting this long already.”

He stands with all the usual grace of his kind, fingertips skimming feather-light over the table, edging toward the palm she still has pressed flat on its surface. He doesn’t touch her, and it’s that—how he denies her—that makes Rey realize with a sickening lurch just how much she wants him to.

He leans in close, voice low enough to make her tremble. He says, “When you decide you want more, come find me.”

Mouth parched, she barely manages to deny weakly, “I won’t.”

His smirk, this time, seems almost rueful. “Of course,” he murmurs. “Whatever you say.”

Then, with a few steps, Kylo is gone. Left behind on the table: the still-full mug of cold coffee, the blank notepad, and a crisply folded fifty dollar bill she never even saw him put down. The only evidence the whole thing wasn’t some fever dream. 

Rey stands on unsteady legs, the chair scraping discordant on the tiled floor, reminding her with a jolt of the real world that seemed to all but drift away in his presence. She takes the money to divvy up between the staff, but before she can slip it into the pocket something flutters out from underneath it, onto the floor.

Stooping to retrieve it, Rey trembles, and it’s silly. How her hands shake as she lifts it up.

It’s a piece of paper. An address on it in neat, black cursive, looping and curling like smoke. Heartbeat thrumming hummingbird-fast against her ribcage, she pockets the paper in her jeans and stuffs the money into her apron.

Rey stands and turns, face hot and voice pitched a little too high, the paper with what must be Kylo Ren’s address seeming to burn a hole through the denim straight through to the bone. She calls to the kitchen window, “Cancel that order for table six, Snap. He already left.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ What would an angel say? The devil wants to know. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRv4VQra2kc)


	4. the angel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again to [ violet ](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) for the beta!! this chapter it was especially really helpful and it was lovely :))
> 
> i am late but u know what?? it's okay and i'm here now :')
> 
> and uhhh keep that voyeurism tag in mind
> 
> EDIT TO ADD THAT @ULRICH-VON-LICHENSTAN ON TWITTER MADE THIS BEAUTIFUL ART [ HERE ](https://twitter.com/jerkinsgherkin1/status/1324456927212969985?s=21)

_ Yes, you are exactly my brand of heroin. _

**the angel **

Later, when Rey goes over to the Dameron mansion, Poe asks her how her work was.

“Anything interesting happen?” he asks, so light and automatic that it seems almost like a joke—now that he feels assured the other vampire clan isn’t going to return anytime soon, Poe knows nothing of any interest ever happens in Forks. Nothing of interest could ever happen to her.

Rey shakes her head, smiling at him all big and fake. “Nope,” she says, popping the ‘p.’ “Nothing at all.”

He comes back again. And again. And again.

At first, it’s only once or twice a week, always during her shift, always wearing that same uniform of neat, expensive black clothing.

The next time he comes, it’s just the same as before. He appears suddenly, without warning, just as supernatural and unnerving as a vampire should be. Sitting in the middle of Maz’s Diner like it isn’t completely insane for him to be there.

She almost thought he would be bored of her by now.

His face tilts to hers like a plant to the sun as she approaches on nervous, coltish legs, looking her up and down with a languorousness that borders on filthy.

“Rey.” Her name in his voice is rich, dark and deep. It makes something inside her quiver, as her thumb clicks her pen nervously. “I was hoping I’d see you again.”

“You know when my shifts are?”

He snorts. “Does that really shock you?”

She shakes her head, breath leaving her lungs in one long, quiet stream. “Just asking,” she mumbles, a little embarrassed at the rush of happiness she feels, as if it’s exciting for this centuries-old thing to be stalking her. That’s obviously not exciting, or cool, or hot, and neither is Kylo Ren.

It’s bad enough he came here last time. It’s bad enough he’s here again.

Obviously.

Soon, he’s there whenever Rey is, from the moment her shift begins until the moment he seems to realize he can’t justify his presence in the diner anymore. He starts bringing books to pass the time between the moments she can appear at his table, and he devours them as quickly as the other patrons devour their breakfasts— _Ulysses, The Once and Future King, Americanah, Dracula, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Persuasion, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Paris Spleen, The History of Sexuality_ (the last of which makes Rey blush and trip over her words as she takes his “order,” all while he watches with two thick fingers tucked in the pages of the book, his eyebrow quirked and lips slanted up). There are even more in languages she doesn’t know or recognize. She asks him, once, how many he speaks, and he snorts, dark eyelashes fluttering.

“Lost track,” he tells her, low and sure.

Sometimes he brings a journal instead, a black leather bound book with yellowing pages tucked in its spine. It’s visibly handmade, but still meticulous, carefully constructed. Obviously not something he’d have gotten from a store. Finicky, fussy vampires with their specific and curated routines to fill their time. Rey wonders if he bound the book himself, and she decides quickly that he did.

It makes something inside her warm to him. Just a little. Not too much.

At first, he brings a journal already stuffed to the brim with his elegant script, the text on every page obscured with a multitude of conflicting languages and what she suspects might be his own personal code. When he bulldozes through that one, he arrives the next day with another, blank and ready to be filled.

He might be baiting her, she considers one especially slow day. Waiting for her to ask about one of his books, or about why exactly he writes so furiously every day. He’s probably only doing it as part of a performance, a desperate tactic to get her to sleep with him, or run away with him, or whatever it is he’s after. Probably bite her head off, she reminds herself forcefully.

But. Still.

Rey twirls her pen in her fingertips during the 1 p.m. lull, and she asks him about it anyway.

“What do you write in that thing?”

Kylo’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t look up at her yet. He keeps writing for a long moment—in French this time, she thinks, spotting the words _mon rêve_ —his gaze focused on his own beautiful, flowing cursive, each letter impossibly perfect.

“Everything,” he finally says, silk-soft. His eyes flick up to hers, a darker crimson than usual. He needs to feed soon. It’s probably been weeks.

He must be starving.

“Like?” she prompts, voice far too tremulous for comfort.

His shoulders rise a little as he pulls in an unnecessary breath, head cocking. “I write about the books I’m reading. What I’m studying. I figure out how to describe the way the sun hits the leaves on the trees. Or I imagine how it would feel if its heat could touch me.” His eyes flicker, lips curling up. “I write about my food—how it tasted. How well it sated me.”

Rey stands there, in front of him, knees knocking under her shorts. She wonders how it would feel to have his teeth sinking into her flesh, and the thought is a shivery, horribly satisfying one.

Kylo looks at her, not a trace of humor in his face.

“I write about you,” he adds softly, words flowing from his full lips like honey, sugar-sweet. “Your voice. Your smell. Your smile. The way you fight back.” His eyes darken, mouth twitching, wanting, almost impatient. “How I think it would feel to be inside you. All that warmth and wetness. I imagine drinking from you. Eating you—”

“Eating me?” she interrupts, offended and a little flustered.

“—out.” His brow furrows, eyes lighting up in delight as she flushes. “Eating you out, Rey.”

Her eyes lower as he chuckles to himself, amused at her mistake. Rey fidgets, shifting from one foot to the other.

After a moment, when she can meet his gaze again, she pauses for a minute to take him in. His eyes are really, really dark. Almost black.

“When’s the last time you hunted?” she asks quietly.

His nostrils flare. “A while ago.”

“And when will you hunt next?”

Kylo hesitates, expression wry enough that it makes him seem almost human. After a moment, he admits, “A while longer.”

That, she thinks, should definitely be scarier to her than it is: a very hungry vampire, who has already expressed an interest in drinking her blood (and more besides, but she’s not going to address that right now) is sitting in the middle of her place of work, gulping in her scent like water, and he’s _fasting_.

“It’s not safe for you to be here,” she says, trying to sound more confident in her chastisement than she is.

His fingers curl on top of the table—he’s been more careful about not permanently disfiguring the furniture. His voice is soft and far too honest for comfort when he tells her, “I’d never hurt you, pet.”

His gaze trails down her body slowly, searching as fingertips. He clears his throat and adds hoarsely, “Not unless you asked me to.”

Rey clears her throat, the back of her neck heating as she pointedly asks for his order, pretending she believes him when he peruses the cheap, yellowing menu, putting on a show of taking his time. She can tell by the way he holds his body—the rigidity of his spine, the jump of the muscles in his jaw—that the only thing he’s trying to do is keep her at the table as long as he can.

And Rey...lets him. She stands just at his chair, her knees, bare under her shorts, almost touching the fold of his black jeans—no need to worry about sweat underneath the thick denim, naturally. Kylo keeps up a rhythm with the ball of his foot as he feigns pondering what he’ll eat, occasionally pausing to ask her aimless questions about the specific contents of various sandwiches and soups. After a long few minutes, he finally orders another black coffee and plain toast.

“So that’ll be all for you?” she asks before she leaves, instinct overriding the common sense that reminds her a vampire wouldn’t need anything else from a diner, barring the warm blood of its human customers.

But Kylo doesn’t so much as blink. He leans nearer, one eyebrow arched and full lips quirked. “Not quite,” he murmurs, voice heavy with suggestion. “But that’s enough for now.”

Her gaze flickers to his. Her thighs squeeze together, a tug in the pit of her stomach making her shiver.

“Great,” she breathes, the single word hitched mortifyingly soft and tremulous. 

Then, as if she couldn’t humiliate herself more, she promptly turns on her heel and flees back to the kitchen.

She can feel his eyes following her the whole way there.

Poe takes her to Port Angeles for dinner at the beginning of June. It’s at the restaurant where they had their first date—where Poe revealed to her he couldn’t read her mind, so matter-of-fact and quietly frustrated about it. At the beginning, Rey found it understandable, maybe even endearing, that her boyfriend wanted to know her every little thought.

At the beginning.

After the waiter takes their orders, leaving them alone with their waters and sodas—Poe wouldn’t charm the man into giving them wine or beer—Rey sits across from the love of her life in discomfiting silence. She eats her meal across from him as he drinks his water and smiles that bright, gleaming smile she fell in love with, and she makes herself smile back.

It’s been getting harder recently: to make conversation, to listen to his stories or to tell him her own, to smile when he pats her on the cheek or gives her a chaste peck on the lips. When they do talk, she feels a little like she can guess every turn of the conversation, every single thing that will make him frown or furrow his brow or say, _I don’t know about that, Rey._ Every time he pushes her away in bed, demurring to _take her virtue_ , something inside her bends just a little bit more. It seems like it’s inevitable that she’ll break, one way or the other.

She isn’t quite sure why. She loves him; she knows she loves him.

It just didn’t used to be so tiring.

Rey sips her Coke out of her straw and lets the rhythmic cadence of his voice as he suggests hiking spots for them to visit again (and again, and again) lull her into a blank complacency.

Kylo might be watching her at night. Rey doesn’t know for sure. 

When Poe leaves in the evening (she’s been asking him to do that more, citing migraines, an upset stomach, an early morning shift at the diner), Rey tells herself she’s going to forget about Kylo and get some rest.

Inevitably, she ends up like this: writhing on her bedsheets, circling a pebbled nipple with her thumb while she rides her own hand, the window wide open. She tells herself it’s not for him, that it’s just to let in the breeze.

She thinks she can feel him watching her. She can almost imagine the way his eyes would darken, his body shifting, sleek and predatory, as she puts on a show. How much he’d want to touch, to get inside her however he can. She thinks of his voice, dipping low and hungry on her name, and of his teeth on her neck, wrists, the soft insides of her thighs.

She realizes, with an almost terrifying tug of arousal, that she wants him to watch her. 

It should horrify her. It should be the thing that finally stops her, that sends her into her boyfriend’s loving embrace, that terrifies her into giving up the strange little dance she’s found herself in with that bloodthirsty monster.

It doesn’t.

Instead, Rey comes harder than she has in weeks.

The first time they touch since he held her down in that ballet studio, it’s almost entirely on accident.

It’s because Rey trips. She’s always doing that. Poe teases her about it sometimes. Stumbling, flailing, getting hit in the head with volleyballs. Usually, her clumsiness serves as a reminder to the Dameron clan that she is adorably human, frighteningly breakable. They find it charming, maybe a little bit pathetic: a little bird with a broken wing for Poe to coddle and nurse. Usually, they fly to her side, fearful for her fragile human body and scared of what might happen if she bleeds in a house full of vampires.

When Rey stumbles on a chipped tile in the diner, the order that Kylo won’t eat from falling out of her hands, Kylo’s reaction is a little different.

He’s on his feet before the plate hits the ground, catching her by the waist so she won’t fall to the floor with it. His grip on her is careful, his fingers clutching her cold even through the thin fabric of her t-shirt. Even so, every point where their bodies connect feels alight, burning. It’s utterly cliche, that time seems to stand still. All the air seems to leave the room as he holds her.

Rey stares up at him, open-mouthed and breathless, eyes roaming across every inch of his beautiful features. Black eyes and prominent nose, full lips she wants to bite between her dull, human teeth. As she looks, something in his expression darkens even further, a hunger crossing his face that she knows has nothing to do with the blood rushing to her cheeks, or her heartbeat pumping quick as a rabbit.

She sways on her feet, nearer to him, and it’s so sudden and strange, that their mouths are scant inches apart. It would be so easy for him to close that distance, she thinks suddenly. The work of a moment. And if he does, everything changes.

Kylo’s palm slips up her waist, the hem of her shirt riding up with the movement. The fingers of his other hand flex on her wrist, holding her forearm between their bodies, his jaw clenching.

“Alright there, pet?” he asks, his voice dropping deep and rough.

She thinks she’s holding her breath; she feels faintly dizzy, out-of-herself.

She clears her throat and nods, licking her lips. Something tugs at the pit of her stomach when his eyes track the movement.

“Happens all the time,” she offers, trying to pitch it into a joke, unsurprised when it fails.

Kylo looks at her, and he looks at her. The longer he does, the more she can see it in his eyes: how much he wants her. It should feel odd to admit, maybe even like she’s full of it, thinking herself so special, taking him at his word when he called her so. But Rey knows Kylo wants her like she knows her own reflection in the mirror.

He wants her more than anything. More than he has in a long time, maybe in centuries. And he wants her to come to him on her own, ready and willing.

It must be difficult for him, unnatural, to bend for something like this. To be at the mercy of someone like her.

It gives her a heady rush of pleasure to realize it.

Kylo’s eyes dip down her face, lingering on the hollow of her throat. Perhaps imagining all the ways he could get inside her.

He opens his mouth as if to speak, but nothing comes out. He just keeps staring, as if awestruck at the very sight of her.

Rey moves away first. She apologizes loudly for the spill and clears it up with shaking hands, rushing past a confused Tallie Lintra on the way to the kitchen.

By the time she comes back out, Kylo has already left.

“What’d you get up to at work today?” Poe asks her later, his eyes flickering between her and the road.

Rey is almost able to make herself smile at him. Not quite. She says, “Oh, nothing in particular.”

It’s what she’s been telling him for weeks, shrugging off his questions like he’s a nosy relative, someone to be tolerated.

But Poe doesn’t even seem to notice anything is wrong. He just grins brightly and tells her about the medical text he lent to Finn, explaining it in excruciating detail, paying no attention to how she doesn’t even reply, looking out the window of his car at houses she’s passed a million times before.

After Poe has already left her bedroom with a kiss on her forehead and a pat on her hair, Rey fucks herself on her fingers to the thought of Kylo Ren. She lays on top of her bedsheets, naked and flushed, small tits bouncing with every desperate rub of her hands. She stifles most of the noises she makes, but she lets some of the sounds carry across the room, just enough to reach him if he’s there. Just enough for him to taste it.

The warm breeze rolls in through the open window, the sound of the tree branches groaning in time with her bed springs.

She squirms helplessly as she nears her climax, eyes fluttering open and closed as she imagines Kylo pounding into her, stuffing her full, his huge hands digging bruises into her tender flesh. Taking what he wants, giving her everything she needs, claiming, conquering. She imagines his voice in her ear, what he’d say to her— _is this what you want, little one, look at how warm and soft you are for me_ —his chest on her back, his teeth on her throat.

This won’t be enough, something inside her recognizes with a dreadful certainty. Soon, she’ll need more.

She comes with a barely muffled cry, bucking her hips as the aftershocks rush through her, and it takes her a long moment to realize the word she’s been repeating into the air, her mouth dry and vocal chords scraped raw.

 _Kylo, Kylo, Kylo_.

Sweat cools on her bare breasts, her own slick creaminess painting the insides of her thighs sloppy-wet. Rey shivers, her eyes closing tight.

She wants him to be there when she opens her eyes.

But he isn’t. 

At the end of June, on a Wednesday morning, Kylo orders his usual—plain toast with a black coffee, each of which he leaves practically untouched.

It’s the solstice, and the hottest day of the summer so far. Rey keeps fanning herself with her hand, stray hairs sticking to the sweat on the nape of her neck. Maz’s air conditioner doesn’t do much against the heat.

Kylo doesn’t come in until the very end of her shift, after the sun has already begun to set behind the trees, and the sky has darkened enough to hide his true nature.

This time after she takes his order, before she leaves the table, he asks quietly, “Can you bring one of those,” his fingers make a square shape, a ridiculous little gesture that plucks on something in her heart like the strings of a violin, “little things of honey, too?”

It stops Rey in her tracks. Her arm falls to her side, eyebrows tilting together in confusion. “Why would you need that?”

He eyes her, mouth twitching. “Do I need a reason?”

“Don’t you?”

His tongue darts out and swipes over his bottom lip. Rey watches the movement, only blinking back to attention when he clears his throat. “Human food tastes like ash to me now,” he mutters low, “but I still—miss it sometimes.”

Rey can do nothing but gawk at him, utterly transfixed as his lips curve into a wry smile.

“I didn’t ask to be turned, you know,” he offers quietly. “I wasn’t on death’s door. I was twenty-eight. I had a family, a mother and a father. Their bloodline ended with me.”

His chin tips up as he speaks, eyes scanning the room, avoiding hers. It could be a trick, something to get her guard down. Rey should ignore it, and she should know better than to listen. But it doesn’t feel like that, not really; it feels like he’s spilling his guts, a little.

“Being close to you,” he murmurs, “being near your scent—it’s the most _human_ I’ve felt in centuries.” His throat clears, dark eyelashes flickering against his cheeks. “The most I’ve...felt.”

Her breath is stopped, caught in her lungs. He grins wryly, still not meeting her eyes.

“You don’t believe me,” he says. “All of this, and you still don’t believe me.”

“I can’t.” The words stick in her throat like toffee. “I’m nobody. There’s nothing special about—”

“Rey,” he interrupts. His eyes are fixed back on hers, black and cavernous. “You must realize—you must know by now that isn’t true. You _are_ special,” he says, the sentence a blunt instrument, impossible to avoid. “To me.”

“Why should I trust that? Trust anything you say?” Her back is straight, shoulders squared and quaking. “You’ve already made it perfectly clear your motives are less than pure.”

Kylo’s lips churn, jaw ticking. “That doesn’t mean I’m lying.”

“I can’t know that.”

“ _Rey_.” It’s sinful, how deep his voice drops on her name. He has to know what it does to her: how it makes her feel like her skin is on fire. “I’ve been trying to be patient,” he tells her, looking anything but. “I have. But you must be tired of pretending.”

Her throat tightens, hands closing into fists. He doesn’t know her, she keeps thinking, almost desperately, he doesn’t know anything about her. “What exactly am I pretending?”

“Everything. You do it all the time.” Something in the way he speaks makes it seem like he should be laughing, but he isn’t. He’s utterly serious. Under his attention, she feels entirely too visible. Like she’s the only thing he sees in the room. “You pretend you’re happy. That your friends understand you. That you love your boyfriend. That you want this life.” Something in his expression shifts, growing darker, needier. His voice is a purr, velvet-soft and ragged. “You pretend you don’t know I’m there when you touch yourself.”

The plastic pen makes a cracking sound in her grip. Her blood pounds in her ears.

“You’re a fucking stalker,” she hisses, but he doesn’t so much as blink.

“I wouldn’t be there if you didn’t want me to see.”

Rey inhales sharp, the world around her forgotten. Everything beyond him seems fuzzy, distant. They’re standing in her territory, in her human world, but it might as well just be them. She can’t tear herself away. Not even if she wanted to. “You think you know me,” she bites out, “and you _don’t_. No one does.”

Kylo looks back at her, unwavering.

“But I do,” he says.

Her lips part, drawing in breath like she might say something in reply, but nothing comes out. Not a sound.

He says, “I want you,” only confirming what she’s long-since known, every sound shuddering, torn from him. It still makes everything inside her pulse, liquid and molten-hot. “Every part of you. More than anything. And I know you want me too.”

For a moment, she can’t think. Or speak. Or even breathe, really. Laid out like that, it all seems so obvious, inevitable.

Because it’s true.

But she knows it shouldn’t be.

“I don’t,” she manages finally, choking out the lie like bitter fruit. She half-turns from him, hoping he can’t see the trembling in her fingers. “I think you should leave, Kylo.”

He’s quiet for a second. Still staring up at her like she might change her mind. She can’t look back, she decides, or she _will_. “You _think_ I should,” he repeats slowly. “Is that what you really want?”

The hair around her temples hides her face a little, keeping her from looking him fully in the eye. She can’t. If she does she will—

“Yes,” she lies.

She hears rather than sees him stand up, his massive frame filling the space beside her. All of her senses prickle as he moves the air around her head, his scent filling her mouth. Cedarwood, maybe. Pine. Something earthy, loamy and dark.

“Come.” His voice is barely audible, a hoarse plea. “Tonight. If you don’t I’ll consider that your answer. I’ll leave you alone. You won’t have to see me again.”

Rey stares resolutely ahead, focusing on a crooked poster frame she’s seen a million times before on the wall. Seattle’s skyline. So close to home. No one around them seems to even notice the way the world is shifting under her feet, stretching and shivering like some great beast right beneath her.

Kylo bends close to her, his lips brushing the shell of her ear, fingertips threatening the pulse inside her wrist. Her vision blurs, heartbeat pounding in her throat, rattling her skull.

“Tonight, Rey,” he all but begs her. “Please.”

Rey closes her eyes. Inhales. Opens them.

And he’s gone.

That night, Rey is insatiable.

The second Poe climbs through her bedroom window, she pounces, tugging him down by the collar of his shirt to kiss her full on the mouth. 

Her head is empty. Almost empty. She pushes every thought from her mind—the image of Kylo’s eyes searing into hers, the rumble of his voice, the muscles of his forearms flexing as he reached for her—and she focuses instead of Poe’s lips moving in hers, his body pressing into her chest. She doesn’t want anything or anyone else.

She _doesn’t_.

She’ll prove it.

“Rey.”

They’re uncoordinated, legs stumbling and connecting uncomfortably as she pulls him back to her bed. This is what she’s been waiting for, and she is finally going to get it.

With her eyes closed, it’s easier to imagine—to pretend—

No. She’s not pretending.

“Rey,” Poe mumbles into her mouth as she falls back on her mattress, pulling him on top of her, “hey, slow down—”

She doesn’t. Rey contorts herself into a pretzel as she struggles to tear her shirt above her head, trying to tempt him into giving in to her. She gets as far as the middle of her stomach before his hands halt her progress, curling around her forearms and keeping her modesty in check.

His eyes flash, brow furrowing together as he glares down at her. “Rey, _stop_.”

“Please.” It’s awful, how sad and desperate she sounds, even to her own ears. She knows what he’s thinking, can read it in every line of his face. Why can’t she leave this alone? What is _wrong_ with her? “Please, Poe, I just—”

“Rey, no,” he repeats, voice firm and no-nonsense as a schoolteacher.

And that’s it. The proverbial last straw.

Rey makes some wild, snarling noise and shimmies away from her boyfriend, moving as far across the room from him as she can the moment he lets her go. She ends up near her dresser, shaking and quivering like the little lost lamb she knows he thinks she is, emotions barreling through her chest too quickly for her to catch. 

She can feel Poe looking at the back of her head. Can practically envision his incredulous, baffled expression. His perfect, flawless face.

“What has gotten into you?” he asks, clipped and irritated like he rarely gets.

Rey whirls around and shoots back too loudly for the space, “Why won’t you fuck me?”

He is seated on the edge of her bed, blinking at her outburst. His forehead is smooth, nothing in his eyes indicating he has the faintest idea what is going on.

With a horrible turn of her stomach, Rey realizes he still has absolutely no clue.

“What?” His head shakes, black curls of hair bouncing as his gaze flutters to the ceiling. “We’ve talked about this, honey, I don’t want to take—I’m old-fashioned about this. You know that.”

“But why? Why not? I’m offering, aren’t I? It’s what I want.” Rey registers that her hands are waving in every direction as she speaks, worked up and outraged. She wants him to listen to her for once, she wants him to pay some _fucking attention—_ “I don’t need my boyfriend saving my virtue, keeping me from ruination.”

He sighs, so reluctant to indulge her little fit. “I’m just trying to protect you.”

“From _what_?” she hurls out. “From you? Or from myself?”

It isn’t until she says it out loud—the _moment_ she says it out loud—that she suddenly knows the answer to her question.

Her breath curls sharply through her teeth, choking out into a strangled laugh, “I don’t need your _protection_.” She goes on as Poe stares, his expression all shock and confusion. It makes her angrier than it should, that he thinks he has a right to be confused. Like he never even _noticed_. “I don’t want you to save me from my own stupid choices. I want—I want—”

“You want what?”

“Something more than just this,” she finally bursts out, heated and upset and tired of it _all_ , “more than just us.”

“Rey?”

His face is what makes her realize exactly what she said. It falls instantly, his lips parting and eyes going round and worried.

All this time she spent trying to avoid thinking about this moment. Trying to convince herself how bad she would feel, what a terrible person this would make her. How afraid and lonely she would be on her own.

Instead, she feels nothing so much as _relief_.

“I’ve been trying to make myself fit into your world,” she starts, words fumbled and rushed, trying to heave everything out in one big breath. Rip off the bandaid and let the wound breathe. “So hard. To be the girl you want me to be. But I’m not. I don’t think I ever was.”

“Rey, what are you talking about?”

“It’s over, Poe,” she tells him, the sentence blunt and to-the-point as a baseball bat. “I’m sorry.”

“Rey,” Poe says. The single syllable is full of so much concern, she can hardly even tell if he’s actually sad.

The disappointment in Poe’s eyes probably once would have been enough to make her reconsider. 

For a moment, the world around both of them is silent.

Then, suddenly, the tree branch outside her window creaks, breaking the quiet, drawing her eyes to the sill. To the restless wind, and the night creeping in.

It’s that quick, just the thought of one moment, that Rey knows what she has to do.

“I need to leave,” she mutters to herself, then again, louder, “I need to leave.”

Poe stands as she crosses this bedroom she’s known for less than a year, watching with muted horror as she tugs on a pair of old tennis shoes.

She gets all the way to the window before he finally manages to speak.

“Rey!” he shouts, pulling her attention back to him, where he stands bewildered and outraged and slighted. “Where on _earth_ are you going?”

Rey pauses, looking back at the man she convinced herself was the love of her life. She fingers the slip of paper in the pocket of her shorts and offers him a small smile.

Then, she braces her hands around the wooden window-frame and hauls her feet up onto the sill.

“Don’t follow me,” she tells him, and climbs out of the window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Strange little girl, where are you going? ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7SeqE1yBbg)


	5. the wolf

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank u [violet](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) for beta'ing this chapter she is cool!!! and helpful and good!!!
> 
> don't forget this is a vampire fic, and please note the new tag "blood drinking" bc uh.....yeah that is happening
> 
> i added!! a chapter!!! bc i'm a fool!!!! i'm sorry 2 all who were expecting this fic to be completed :/

_ Your number was up the first time I met you. _

** the wolf **

Halfway there, Rey kind of regrets not taking her truck. On foot, she finds that Forks is deceptively wide and annoyingly lacking in well-paved sidewalks. Naturally, Kylo didn’t exactly pick his inexplicable mansion in the woods for its ease of access, and Google Maps keeps losing her location and finding it again with robot irritation. Not to mention: in the hour it takes Rey to get anywhere close to said inexplicable mansion, she is left with plenty of time to do nothing but think.

Rey thinks...a lot. Thoughts like: I am making a life-ruining mistake. Poe is never going to forgive me and neither will his family. Kylo is going to murder me when I get there.

She keeps walking anyway. In for a penny. Sunk cost fallacy. She’s reasonably confident that Kylo is not going to murder her. She is going to do exactly what she wants for once in her boring, nothing of a life. Et cetera.

After an inordinately long time, with her muscles aching dully and stomach tied up in neat little knots, Rey finally makes it to the address Kylo gave her all those weeks ago.

The house is a behemoth of a thing; not modern or stylish like the Dameron mansion, nor creepy and ancient like some Nosferatu palace (she thinks, having never seen _Nosferatu_ ). It’s something between the two: audaciously big and vine-covered and brick-walled. Like the summering home a disgraced Duke would jaunt to in the event of a terrific scandal. There’s a wrought-iron gate she has to use two arms to open, and a long, winding stone pathway trailing through the flowers and weeds. Rey follows it, every step bringing her closer and closer to the front door. To Kylo.

Eventually, Rey reaches it. The door. Standing there, shivering in her faded t-shirt and ratty shorts, she lifts the ancient-looking, intricately carved brass knocker and lets it bang back into place. Just once.

Then, suddenly, the door is open.

For a long moment, they just stare at each other. Rey blinks, breath catching in her throat as Kylo’s eyes trail down her body, darting back to her face. His usual deathly-pallor seems almost pinkish as his lips part and black eyes widen.

“You’re here,” he murmurs, breathless, fangs glinting in the moonlight.

She shifts on her feet, thumb tracing the nail of her index finger. “You seem surprised,” she says, eyeing the twitch of his hands at his sides. How they tremble in a way she’s never seen before, how it’s far too human for what he is. Like he’s waiting, impatiently, for the moment he can reach out and _grasp_.

“I am,” he replies, voice rough, nearly strangled.

“You thought I wouldn’t come?”

His Adam’s apple bobs in his pale throat. “I didn’t want to hope,” he admits at last, dark eyes flickering. 

Rey stares. This terrible, lethal, beautiful creature. To think she was ever afraid of him.

She takes a breath. A step forward.

She crosses the threshold.

Kylo holds himself still as marble, a statue draped in black, as she walks into the foyer. Rey feels the way he breathes her in, his lungs pulling her scent inside himself, trying to gather up every piece he can. She looks around as the entryway opens into a broad living space, her eyes drifting up to a crystal chandelier, tugged then to a mountainous couch and overstuffed armchair, a chaise lounge with brass buttons lining its edge. Each piece of furniture in pristine condition, swathed in sheets of plastic.

Rey swallows, recognizing at once the reason for that.

“Who lived here?” she asks, spinning on her heel to face him. He hasn’t budged an inch from where he stands sentry at the front door. “Before you, I mean?”

Kylo shakes his head, a slight jerk in one direction that strains the tendons in his neck. Vampires don’t have a heartbeat. How would his tendons stand out?

For that matter, how would he get an erec—

 _Probably just magical_ , Rey remembers Rose telling her once. _Maybe don’t overthink it._

Don’t overthink it.

“No one lived here before me,” he says. “I’ve always owned this house.”

“Always?”

“Since the late 1890s at least,” he corrects himself. “This one and others. When I want a space to...rest. During my travels.”

As he speaks, he moves forward one pace, then another. One ivory hand trails along the wall leading into the room as he moves, his fingernails dragging audibly. Scraping.

Rey trembles, her stomach tightening. Her hands twist together behind her back as he nears her. She is beginning to regret her choice of attire—silly little human thing in her silly little human clothes. Kylo Ren owns a house; _more_ than one. Mansions he decamps to when he grows weary of his worldly adventures. The image of him, clad in expensive black fabrics and glittering moonlight, arriving in the dead of night at the door of this house appears in her mind. Here is where he has probably taken women wearing silk evening gowns, sporting diamonds around their thin necks like slit throats. They’ve probably been where she’s standing right now, in the middle of his flawless, checkered marble floor, wearing a University of Washington t-shirt that’s at least two sizes too big and tennis shoes that might’ve once been white.

He probably ate a few of them on the plastic-covered sofa to her left.

One foot. Another. Another.

Kylo closes the distance between them like a pair of jaws, snapping closed around her.

All at once, he is standing before her.

Rey draws in her breath sharply, her chin tipping up so she can meet his gaze. It softens as he inclines his head to her, something like wonder in his eyes.

He clears his throat. “Didn’t you wonder why I was passing through Forks, of all places?”

She can barely think enough to shake her head no.

“Did you think it was fate?” he asks, a hint of teasing in the airiness of his words.

His hand lifts between them; he pinches a strand of hair left curling at her temples between his thumb and forefinger.

Rey blinks up at him owlishly, exhaling through just-parted lips.

A fingertip traces the curve of her jaw, his skin cool against her overheated cheek. His touch is the most delicate thing, gentler than what she once would have expected from him. Gentler than she needs.

His eyes dart to her mouth, his nostrils flaring as he inhales her scent. Honey and sex.

His voice is ragged, torns to shreds, when he finally speaks again.

“Did you think it was destiny, Rey?”

She nods, unable to say it aloud. Unable to look away.

 _Transfixed._ That’s the word for it.

A noise rumbles through his chest, a satiated growl of pleasure.

His knuckles trail across her bare skin, around the curve of her waist, up her spine. Drawing the hem of her shirt with it, baring an expanse of skin. No one has touched her here; no one has traced a fingertip along the ridge of her shoulder blade. The thumb of his other hand pulls, unhurried, over her pulse point, back and forth. Back. Forth.

“I’ve been dead for a long time,” he says, so soft she can hardly even hear it. “And I’ve never seen anything like you before.”

She sways on her feet, held up in the circle of his arms, her gaze dropping to his lips. Those lips. How she’s spent weeks wondering how they would feel on her skin.

“Kylo,” she manages, “I—”

“You are staggering, Rey,” he tells her, a note of desperation in his voice she’s never heard before, “you _stagger_ me—”

Rey kisses him.

It’s nothing like she imagined.

His mouth is soft despite the cool marble of his flesh. Giving. He sighs into her lips, his fingers clutching the back of her shirt until it’s taut against her stomach. He says her name once, reverent.

She had imagined something out of control. A forest fire, hysterical lust, catastrophic passion.

Kylo kisses her like he already loves her.

His whole body bends into hers as she opens her mouth for him, his arms wrapping around her back so he can pull her closer, tightly, so tightly. Her spine arches as he licks inside her mouth; her hands wind around his shoulders, fingers threading through his silky hair. It feels almost tentative. Like a first kiss.

Rey stretches up on her toes, needing more, _craving_ it.

Just like that, something changes.

The kiss grows deeper, their bodies molded together tighter. His tongue slides against hers, and, in spite of the coldness of his skin, when he clutches her against his broad chest his touch is hot enough to burn. Rey gasps, the noise caught between his teeth, swallowed down.

“Rey,” he moans, her name cracked in two, “oh, _Rey—_ ”

Her feet lift off the ground as he hauls her effortlessly up his body. Her thighs wrap around his waist automatically, instinctively, ankles crossed as her canvas sandals slip off her feet. She doesn’t know where he’s taking her. She doesn’t even care. Just as long as he doesn’t let go.

He stumbles forward, blind, tripping on the bottom of an ornate staircase as he carries her to their destination. Rey whines a little when he drops her down on one of the steps, trying to wriggle herself closer, but a wide hand pushes between her breasts, pressing her back, thumb to pinky nearly spanning the width of her chest.

“Can’t wait—” he’s babbling, his obscene shoulders blocking out the light from the chandelier as he arches over her— “been needing to do this so long, pet, please just let me—”

His fingers hook around the elastic band of her shorts and _rip._ In his haste, he splits the seams open, effectively ruining them, leaving her exposed, clad only in her shirt and cotton underwear—

“White,” he snarls, “of _course_ you’re wearing white, do you have any idea what you’re doing to me?”

Rey keens, hips bucking as he slides his hands up her thighs, thumbs trailing dangerously close to the damp, soft triangle between her legs. “Please, please, Kylo—”

“Ben,” he gasps, sounding as out of his mind as she feels, “call me Ben.”

It takes a moment for the words to sink in.

They both freeze.

Dark eyes lift, meeting hers. His are black as pitch, something in his expression unreadable. “It was my name,” he tells her, a quiet hush. “When I was human.”

Rey sits up, elbows braced against the step above her, brow furrowing in confusion. Her head is too clouded with lust to fully process, but—

“Ben?” she says.

His expression shifts as he slinks down her body, all sinuous muscle, slick mouth. Her fingernails scrabble on the hardwood as he forces her legs open, baring her clothed cunt to his attention, pinning her effortlessly underneath him.

He _growls_ , the sound raking over her nerve endings. Rey writhes underneath him, legs kicking out at nothing. She feels the press of his big hands, just on the edge of too much, can imagine the bruises he's leaving for her.

“I want to hear you _scream_ it when I make you come.”

A whine escapes her before she can stop it, scratching high and needy.

His breath ghosts over the skin of her lower belly, raising goosebumps along her arms. His head dips, soft hair tickling the apex of her thighs, so close, so close to where she needs him the most. Her feet shift, slipping down a stair, jolting her whole body. It has the double effect of widening her legs, opening her body up for him.

Rey nods frantically, her voice hitching in her chest when she whispers, “Ben,” and again as his lips wander along her stomach above the elastic of her panties, teeth nipping and tongue licking, not quite hard enough to break skin, still so careful, “Ben, please—”

The sound of tearing fabric distracts her momentarily, long enough to draw her attention down to where Kylo— _Ben—_ has crumpled her destroyed underwear in his hand.

“ _Hey,_ ” Rey protests hotly, sitting up a bit to glare down at him, “I _liked_ those—”

“I’ll buy you more, pet. I’ll buy you whatever underwear you fucking want.” He pushes his hand up over her mound, pulling back the hood of her clit, exposing her to his attention. Rey yelps, squirming as he presses a delicate kiss to the little nub because no one has ever seen her here, no one has ever touched her here, and Kylo is tracing his tongue over her body like he has a right to every inch of it. And maybe he does. Maybe he has for a while now. “Just let me eat this cute little cunt.”

The muscles in her abdomen tremble as she falls back, her whole body arching into his hungry mouth. Her eyes roll back in her head as he licks up her seam, delving expertly between her folds, gathering up the slick wetness dripping out of her. The chill of his body sends shivers racing through her, combating the flushed overheating of her own skin.

“Ben,” she pants, breathless, heels skittering across his back, “oh _f-fuck,_ Ben—”

His mouth is merciless, vicious, tongue swirling around her clit in brutal little circles. Rey can’t help the noises he pulls out of her, the way her fingers tighten into fists in the thatch of his hair.

Her hips buck, rocking. The sensation is so new, so overwhelming that Rey can hardly tell if she wants to get away from it or get even closer. Strong hands hold her in place for him, encircling the whole of her shin in one hand, bracing across her belly with the other. He isn’t quite gentle in how he handles her, but Rey is all too aware of just how much effort it must take for Kylo to restrain himself like this. A warm, soft little human body, ripe for the taking, all that blood inside her just begging to be loosed on his teeth.

Kylo hums as he buries his mouth against her cunt, a low snarl slipping from him as he laps between her legs. When Rey manages to open her eyes again, leaning up to admire the way his lashes flutter against his pale cheeks as he pleasures her, she can see that Kylo’s whole face, from the tip of his nose to the bottom of his chin, is absolutely _covered in her._ Soaked.

Rey lets out a hoarse cry, spine arching up. Her hands grope shamelessly at her tits, hard nipples poking through the thin fabric of her shirt, branding her palms.

He eats her pussy like he wants to eat her alive.

He drinks her the fuck _up_.

The hand on her shin meanders up her leg, skimming the inside of her thigh, cold fingers playing along her skin until inevitably, inexorably, they reach their destination. Kylo traces his middle finger along her slit, gathering up the wet until it slides down, circling her entrance like a promise.

Rey jumps, shocked at the feeling, at the temperature, the foreign sensation of someone else’s hand venturing here, between her legs, inside her. Her body shifts, her ass slipping to the edge of the stair as her legs widen even further around Kylo’s shoulders. She inhales, startled, as he impales her on that finger, and then again when he groans against her clit, vibrations sharpening her pleasure to the point of pain. 

“Tight little virgin cunt,” he grunts. Vampires don’t sweat, don’t exhaust, don’t even run out of breath, but Rey swears there’s a flush high on his cheeks as he fingerfucks her. “Gonna get you ready. Open up my sweet human girl until she’s ready to take my cock.”

He pumps his finger inside, rhythmic and embarrassing wet noises filling the air alongside their panting moans. She feels unraveled, liquid. His fingers are sinfully thick, easing her apart.

One, then two.

Rey pants, trying to control her breathing as Kylo works his fingers through her channel, again and again and _again_. It’s nothing like she imagined; it’s _better_ than she imagined. The sight of him there, pink lips latched around her clit, knuckles bumping rhythmically against her ass as he fucks her on his hand—it’s an image out of her deepest fantasies, dreams she never told anyone about. The ones that made her wake up aching, desperate to be touched. By him. Just like this. 

There’s a slight pinch as he skewers her on a third finger, still suckling her clit between his full lips. Rey breathes erratically, shivering into pieces beneath him. She tugs on his hair, body twisting, chasing her release, desperate. She all but sobs when he abruptly withdraws his fingers, leaving her painfully empty, clenching around nothing.

Furious balled up fists bang on his shoulders, ineffectual and pathetic.

Kylo stares at her as he leans away, looking at once flummoxed and irritatingly self-satisfied.

“Oh, _poor thing_.” His voice dips, dulcet, savagely sweet. Wet fingers wind up her body, tugging the hem of her shirt along her stomach. “Poor, sweet pet didn’t get to come, hm?”

“ _Kylo._ ”

He frowns at the name-switch, expression suddenly stern and no-nonsense, and she watches his chest heave wide as he inhales, as if about to chastise her.

But Rey—Rey is stupidly, unreasonably _furious_. Unfulfilled, cruelly turned on, her heartbeat throbbing in her pussy. It’s instinct to take care of it herself. To do it with him _watching_. He has been for weeks, after all.

Rey’s hand slips to her cunt before he can tell her to stop.

She rubs her clit hard, fast, trying to ratchet up the tension in her belly again, trying to make it snap. It’s different from all the times she’s done this before. _Performed_ for him. Pretended that she didn’t know how he watched her, how he filled his eyes with the sight of her bare, wet cunt, fingers working desperately between her legs. How she imagined him with her, all that time, imagined him on top of her, surrounding her, whispering depraved little nothings in her ear, and now—

—and _now—_

Kylo blinks down at her once, twice, all annoyance at her seemingly vanished, gone up in smoke. Through his starched, pressed slacks, she can see the angry outline of his cock, jutting up against his hip. He looks almost in pain as she strokes herself, his jaw hanging open dumbly.

“ _Rey._ ” Strangled, _helpless,_ the way he says her name; it makes a horrible thrill roll through her, shivering with pride as she plays with her clit, “Rey, what are you—”

“What’s wrong? I thought you liked to look,” she says, lofty, the effect dampened only slightly by how out of breath she is.

Kylo snarls, and in the next moment he is surrounding her, his arms braced on the step above her head, chest hovering inches above her own, kneeling between her legs. But not quite covering her, sprawled out across the staircase, draping down the steps like silk, slipped underneath him. He leaves space for her to work her arm, giving her plenty of room to take her pleasure. 

“Because I couldn’t touch,” he chokes out, fangs glinting in the shattered light of the chandelier. “I couldn’t—how can you tell me to sit and look when I can touch you?”

Her wrist brushes against his hip every time she moves it, rubbing frantically. He sighs, the noise sounding almost pained, eyelids fluttering.

“You were mean,” she huffs, the words broken up between whimpers and moans.

Rey gasps as she nears her release, hands scrabbling for purchase, finding it around his shoulders, fingers tightening in his shirt until she feels the fabric start to give.

Kylo isn’t breathing. His whole body is quaking, his arms trembling around her neck. His eyes rove over her body, dark and unrelenting. He looks on the edge. Hungry. _Starving,_ really.

Something foolish and impulsive inside her roars to life. Makes her tilt back, crane her head to one side. Expose the thin, breakable column of her throat to the carnivore kneeling between her thighs.

Impossibly, his eyes grow even wider, become the size of dinner plates.

“Drink up,” she whispers.

A beat passes, one where Kylo does nothing but look at her, stare. For a moment, Rey worries he’ll ask her that question, the one she’s started to dread: _are you sure about this, Rey?_

But he doesn’t.

He bends, fitting his chin in the curve of her shoulder. His lips are gentle, at first, almost hesitant. But she can feel it when he bares his teeth, how his mouth curls into a smile. His fangs prick, then press.

Dig in.

At first, Rey doesn’t really register the change. It feels a little strange, like needles, like getting a shot. He shifts, settling into the cradle of her knees. His hands flitting down her sides, wrapping under the small of her back. Tugging her close, closer.

She feels Kylo grunt against her skin, inhale sharp and agonized. He moans as she writhes, trying to nudge her soaked, bare cunt against the ridge of his cock, heavy and huge and ignored. He _sucks_.

Her body relaxes by inches, going limp in his arms. Letting him drink his fill. Gorge himself.

She whimpers when he licks along her throat, the strangest feeling overtaking her as he groans, guttural, against the flicker of her pulse, over the indentation his teeth just made. 

“Pretty,” he says, sounding almost dazed, blood-drunk, “pretty, sweet little thing, taste even better than I imagined, fucking _delicious—_ ”

“Ben?” her voice hitches on the end of the syllable, drawing out into a squeal as he bites again, harder, sharper. Her whole body twinges, _throbs_. He’s so close, every part of his body covering hers, but he’s still so far from where she wants him, where she _needs_ him— “Ben, please, can you just—”

It’s like he reads her mind. Because he _knows_ , murmuring in her ear as his hand slips between them, “Did you think I’d forgotten this, pet? This weepy little cunt ruining my fucking pants—”

“Buy more,” she breathes, and he laughs as his fingers slip inside her again. He scissors them apart, curls them up. Opens her, like a lock.

Rey squirms, helpless, pinned. As he speaks, the second bite bleeds freely, the wound open for him to return to, caress with the flat of his tongue. Drinking her up.

“Now don’t forget,” he says, his voice deep, ragged, _ruined_. His wet thumb brushes her clit, making her keen loud into the air. “I’m going to make you come on my hand in a few seconds, and you won’t forget what you promised. Right?”

She sobs, her whole body tightening, squeezing and shaking. Shakes her head, frantic, vision blurring as she climbs and keeps climbing, keeps climbing, keeps—

“Say it,” he hisses. “Scream my fucking name, Rey—”

Rey buries her fingers in the meat of his shoulders and does exactly what he told her, rides out her orgasm in the palm of his hand.

She comes with her eyes wide, mouth wet and hiccuping, unable to look away as his irises brighten slowly, blood red boiling to the surface. Kylo stares back, thirst slaked and hunger sated, lips dripping.

“Even better,” he repeats, voice choked in his throat, his fingertips dragging slow along the insides of her thighs. “Even fucking better.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ So let's take a ride and see what's mine. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R74tATadglU)


	6. the lion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE LAST TIME!!! THANK U [VIOLET](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) FOR THE BETA!!!! she is the best and very talented and very sweet and overall a stand-out lady
> 
> so i changed the mechanics of vampire turning in the twilight universe which is explained (i think) decently well within the text below. mostly bc i think smeyer's insistence on trying to explain vampire physiology makes you get more hung up on the details (ie accursed hybrid baby - how does edward have semen? we'll never know). just trust the vampire magic.
> 
> on a similar note: there is discussion of said hybrid babies in this chapter bc i think it's funny, but if discussion of pregnancy bugs you feel free to skip from the line that starts "“Should I have worn one?” Kylo says flatly, tone dry enough to catch on fire." until "“I’m still pissed, by the way,” she announces, tucking her hand under her chin so she can sit upright and look more directly at him, “that you can’t turn into a bat.”"
> 
> thank you to everyone who read and commented and kudos'd!!!! i had a ton of fun writing this fic, and i hope you guys enjoyed it too!!!!!!! with that: the de-virginating

_ Don't be self-conscious, if I could dream at all, it would be about you. _

** the lion **

When she wakes, it’s all at once, and not entirely pleasant.

Rey is disoriented, dizzy. It takes her a long moment to register where she is: somewhere new, laying in something soft, practically walled in on all sides in puffy white bedsheets and mountains of pillows. She sits up, rubbing the back of her hand absently over one eye, yawning into consciousness. It’s daytime. The light streams in through the lace-edged curtains, white too, and casts across the edge of the bed.

 _His_ bed. In _his_ house.

Because that’s where Rey is.

Why does he even own a bed?

She stretches as discreetly as she can, rolling the bones of her ankles and wrists in quick, practiced circles. Her neck feels a little tender, maybe a little bruised; she presses her fingers to her throat, feeling for bite marks, a little surprised when she finds none. As if her skin had already stitched itself back together.

“I forgot how much you humans can sleep.”

Rey startles, blinking down at the man crouching at the side of the bed. Kylo stands smoothly, graceful as a dancer, his mouth tipped in a private smile. She’s still in her clothes from the night before—what’s left of them at least, which is very little and actually just her UDub t-shirt—but Kylo is entirely dressed, a new black button-down shirt tucked into new slacks. Presumably because she ruined the first pair, she realizes with a hot rush of embarrassment.

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Tugs the sheets up to her chest and flushes faintly.

“You were watching me sleep?”

“Not at all,” he says lightly. “You’re not very interesting when you’re unconscious.”

“Gee,” she rolls her eyes to the ceiling, barely even finding it strange that there appears to be some kind of Rococo-style floral motif lining the border of the room, “thanks.”

If Kylo recognizes any sarcasm in her tone, he doesn’t show it. “You’re very welcome.”

There’s something in his eyes. Something soft, eager that Rey doesn’t think she’s seen before.

Kylo grins now, wide enough that a curved dimple shows on one flawless cheek. It makes something in her chest seize up. Maybe her beating heart.

“I take it I’m not a vampire,” she says, almost a question. Rey isn’t entirely sure of the mechanics of the change, but if one bite were enough she’s fairly certain she’d notice a difference by now.

Kylo arches one dark brow coolly, his mien inscrutable. “Is that what you were expecting?”

“Well you—you know.” Rey flushes slightly as his eyebrow lifts higher, a glint of amusement edging into his eyes. “Bit me.”

“Ah,” he says simply. “No, it doesn’t work quite like that.”

“Oh?”

“Rest easy,” he murmurs, sitting on the edge of the mattress beside her, head tipped fondly down. Rey wiggles slightly, blood rushing to her cheeks at the way his gaze runs down her body, caressing. “You’d know by now if I had turned you.”

Her nose wrinkles in interest. “Why?”

“Well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, for one thing.” At her blank look, he goes on, explaining, “Because you’d be begging me to kill you.”

An involuntary wince. “That bad, huh?”

“It’s no cakewalk.”

Rey looks up at him. The light coming in through the curtains casts him in light like she’s never seen, but it doesn’t quite touch his skin. “Do you remember it?”

“Vividly.” His voice is dull, flat and lifeless. His expression flickers, faraway, before he inclines his head to the side and goes on, “I haven’t done it personally speaking, but from what I’ve heard the process is quite simple. The venom is instinctual.”

Rey turns this over in her mind for a moment, considering. _Vividly._ Suddenly, that moment in the diner the day before, when he’d looked at her with so much...feeling and told her how he missed it, being human, it seems so much—

So much _more_.

“So why didn’t you?” she asks quietly.

His eyes, which had been lingering on her hand, her fingers threaded together on her belly over her shirt, dart back to hers. “Why didn’t I what?”

It’s quiet, barely a sound. But she knows he can hear it. “Turn me.”

“I didn’t want to without—”

He stops abruptly, hesitating.

“Without?” she prompts gently, and he grins down at nothing, shrugging slightly.

“Asking,” he says.

Rey blinks, a strange thrum rising in her chest. “Oh,” she says, the sound a tiny thing.

For a long moment, Kylo just looks at her. He has this way about him, sometimes, she thinks. Things stir under the surface.

She breaks it first, the tension rising between them. Her hands hover over the borders of the comforter, crushing the pillowy material in her palms before letting it fluff back up again.

“I didn’t really expect to wake up in a _bed_ ,” she observes.

“It was a recent purchase,” he says smoothly, just on the wrong side of too casual.

Rey glances back to him, a smile teasing the corners of her mouth. “How recent?”

Kylo ignores that completely, instead brushing the crook of his forefinger along the bend of her elbow. His hand drifts into the beam of light, glittering bright under the sun. Rey gawks, mesmerized. _Beautiful_. “You rested well, I hope?”

A lump in her throat makes it a little hard to swallow. She nods, trying to focus on anything but the fluttering in the pit of her stomach. “Sorry I passed out,” she offers quietly. “Was I asleep for long?”

He cocks his head, as if considering this deeply. “About ten hours, give or take. You had a long day.”

Rey buries her face in her hands, forgetting about the sheets, letting them drop back into her lap. “Oh, god. I’m sorry.”

“It’s no trouble, little one.”

“But I—I didn’t—” she stammers, wincing, “I came over here so we could—”

“Fuck?” he finishes bluntly.

She nods, blinking fast, a little miserable. “You didn’t even get a turn.”

Kylo hums. His knuckles drift further up her arm, catching more light in the diamond material of his skin. “I don’t know what they teach in the contemporary education system, pet, but reciprocity is not a due requirement of sex. I can take care of myself.”

“Did you?”

The question is whispered, barely audible to her own ears. But something in his expression changes, his eyes, now a vivid red, darkening as his pupils expand into round discs.

His arm reaches across her body, hand planting on his mattress as he arches over her, pinning her with his gaze.

Rey squirms. She can’t help it, the little whimper that escapes her throat.

“I wanted to wait,” he rumbles, his voice emanating from deep in his broad chest. “For you.”

Her eyes flit across his face as he leans further, entranced, hypnotized by how the light alters his appearance so completely. Shimmering like the sun glancing off the ocean. He’s so—he’s just so—

“ _Beautiful,_ ” she whispers.

She barely even registers that her hand has lifted to his cheek, fingers threading into his dark hair, until he turns his head. Presses his fingertips to the bones of her knuckles.

Rey whines when his mouth opens, drawing two fingers into the wet heat. He’s warm, on the inside, tongue soft, a strange contrast to the hard chill of his frame. She thinks she can see blood on the tips of his incisors.

Kisses trail down her hand, to the soft underside of her forearm.

His eyes raise to hers, an unspoken question in the arch of his brow.

She nods, heart in her throat.

A smile flashes across his face. He sinks his teeth in her flesh.

A gasp curls through her mouth, lingers in the air between them. Rey holds her breath, mesmerized at how his cheeks hollow, eyes closed in ecstasy as he sucks her blood onto his tongue. She feels that too, after a moment, swiping across the bite. She watches as her skin seals up in his wake, knitting seamlessly together. Then, she watches him trace his lips further up, finding another tender place. “Just a sip,” he groans.

Rey hisses, more from shock than pain at the sharp pinch, as he buries his teeth there too. 

Her head swims, body tightening. Kylo moans, the sound muffled into the bite.

After a long moment, he draws back, licking again over the wound, letting it close perfectly, leaving only a silvery, half-moon pattern on her skin, visible only in the light.

“Neat trick,” she breathes. Sitting up a little, she tilts her head, awestruck at the sight of his irises changing, bubbling from crimson into a violent scarlet red.

Kylo hushes her as she moves, nudging closer so he can gently push her back, laying her against the pillow. He titters as he brushes the bird’s nest of her hair back from her face, affection obvious in his elegant features.

“Rest,” he mutters, “don’t try to move too much. Don’t want you to faint.”

Rey blinks up at him. An angel. He looks like an angel. How funny. “How much have you taken?”

“Just about a pint. Maybe a pint and a half,” he tells her, almost conversationally. The smell of apple draws her attention away; sure enough Kylo has a cup in his hand, is tipping it up to her mouth. “I went a little overboard last night.”

“A pint and a half is a lot?” She asks it around swallows of apple juice, trying not to laugh the drink out of her mouth.

Kylo frowns, muttering lowly for her to finish the glass. Rey does, and tries not to grin too widely when he then produces what looks like a Clif bar from his pants pocket as he sets the cup on a nightstand that she’s sure is also brand new.

“For someone your size, it can be. But you don’t seem to be experiencing any adverse effects. You’re not, are you?”

She shakes her head as she tears open the packaging, a little amused at his concern. “I would think you’d normally drink a lot more than that.”

“Usually. But not because I need to. It’s just an easy thing, you know. While I’m there.”

“Blood doesn’t taste good as leftovers,” she discerns, and he shrugs.

“Not particularly, but it’s livable. Although, I suppose, just about anything is livable for someone like me.”

Rey swallows a bite of her snack and takes another oversized bite, saying around the food in her mouth, “Poe’s family survives off of animal blood.”

A divot appears in Kylo’s brow at the mention of her ex-boyfriend; his frown deepens. “I’m aware.” His teeth click together as he closes his jaw, opens it again. He clears his throat, eyes darting away when he continues, “Is that something you’d like me to do as well?”

Rey thinks on this for a moment. She nods slowly, eyeing him carefully. “I’d like you to consider it,” she says eventually.

Kylo snorts, shaking his head a little. “I take it you’ll be sticking to a more ethical diet once you’re turned?”

“As a future former human, it feels like the polite thing to do,” she points out, and his chuckle shifts into a laugh.

“The Volturi would disagree,” he says, “but maybe that’s a point in favor of your argument.”

Rey furrows her brow. “The Volturi?”

Kylo waves his hand. “Vampire government,” he says, as if the two words are the only explanation needed and not the most absurd collection of syllables she’s ever heard in her life.

Rey blinks. Decides to leave that particular topic for another time. “Thank you,” she says instead, “by the way. For the food. And the bed.”

The lines in his face all soften. All at once. “Of course,” he says, like he really, really means it. Like: _of course_ he’d do that. For her.

It makes her heart stutter again, stumbling over its own beat.

Rey wipes her hands down the front of her shirt, ridding herself of crumbs. A little satisfied when Kylo visibly winces at the way they track onto the pristine ivory bed sheets.

“How long will I be bedridden?” she teases, lounging back against the headboard, pleased at the way his eyes follow her, how she holds all of his attention.

Kylo coughs into his fist when her shirt rides obscenely high up her uncovered thigh, a gesture so adorably human it makes her thrill. Her thighs are sticky, her skin flushed. She’s bare below the waist, and judging by the way his Adam’s apple bobs in his pale throat, Kylo hasn’t forgotten it.

“You should stay off your feet for a while,” he says, “but after that you can resume normal activity.”

“Are you quoting WebMD at me?”

His brow furrows. “What the hell is that?”

A startled laugh bursts out of her. “Nothing,” she says, and, before Kylo can tell her to lay back down, reaches for his shoulders, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck, “nothing at all.”

Kissing him feels a little bit like kissing a statue. Rey kneels up, arcing over him, hands clutching his neatly pressed shirt collar. He’s always so _perfect_. Maybe she wants to ruin him a little bit.

Maybe she wants to ruin him a lot.

His mouth opens under her, warm tongue slipping between her teeth. She bites down, barely, briefly, but it seems to spark something in him. Kylo groans, his arms coming up to constrict around her back, tugging almost frantically at the bottom of her shirt.

He tastes like iron. Her blood.

His lips work their way under the cut of her jaw, down the side of her throat. Rey moans, dipping her head back, granting him easier access.

Her muscles jump, goosebumps prickling along her arms, when his hand fits suddenly between her legs.

“Not too sore, are you, little one?” His voice is soft, faintly mocking. He must be able to see the bruises she can feel lining her throat, and the ones she noticed only in the sunlight scattered above her knee. Rey is used to bruises; she gets them from tripping and falling and bumping into everything.

But she isn’t sore. Not really. Not where it matters, anyway.

Rey leans back, sitting on his hand. Her eyelashes flicker, a whine leaving her as Kylo’s eyes go cloudy, heavy-lidded. A noise leaves him, something between a groan and a whine, as she rocks her hips slowly against his wrist, grinding her clit on the heel of his palm.

“Christ,” he mutters, “you’re so fucking hot.”

Breathless, she asks, “Like, physically, or…?”

“In every fucking sense of the word,” he grits out.

In the next moment, Rey is in the air, lifted, without gravity. Kylo tosses her back on the mattress, leaving her legs splayed open.

Her chest heaves, gulping in lungfuls of air as he crawls along her body, head low. His mouth drifts, leaving a trail just below her navel. The bottom of her t-shirt hangs around the middle of her waist, and it only takes half a moment for Kylo to pull it off. Her hair fluffs around her head, back curving up as he bends to pull one of her nipples into his mouth.

“So much nicer when you let me touch, isn’t it?” His teeth graze, pull. She cries out, oversensitive, babbling a _yes_ when he repeats sternly, “Isn’t it, pet?”

Rey undulates her hips, whining at the sensation. The hinge of her knees twinge as she widens her legs, struggling to accommodate his frame.

Her heartbeat quickens, hitches to a frantic pace. This is it. This is _it_.

_This is it this is it this is—_

“Ben,” she gasps, “wait.”

He goes perfectly still, crouched above her. If he were human, his arms would be shaking with the effort of holding himself upright. His don’t—but she can see his lips purse, his expression churning.

He waits.

Trembling fingers fly to his collar. His eyes lower, trained on her hands as she works the buttons of his shirt open. Something in his face eases.

He lets her undress him. Slowly. Clumsily. When she manages to get his shirt open, his shoulders roll back, letting the fabric fall off his arms. Rey goes to his belt next, fine black leather, smooth against her fingertips. The silver buckle clinks as she opens it, awkwardly shimmying them off his hips.

A violent sort of fondness overtakes his features as he looks at her, and looks at her. Striking scarlet eyes drift across her naked body, trace the half-moon of her cheek, her jaw.

Rey shoves the wool slacks down as far as she can reach, pushing them off the rest of the way with her toes.

When she’s done, at last, satisfied with her handiwork, Rey leans back, slanting her chin up so she can see him all at once.

Miles of creamy-white skin greets her. Shining in the sun. The expanse of his chest, corded, packed muscle of his arms, strong legs. His cock juts toward her, hard, heavy, the only part of his body that’s flushed almost red, roped with angry-looking veins.

In another life, one where she never moved to Forks, never knew vampires existed, never met any of the Damerons, never met Kylo, Rey knows how losing her virginity would have gone. First semester at University of Arizona, with some guy she met at a frat party, or maybe at a tailgate. She would go with him back to his dorm, with his lofted twin bed and slightly stale sheets. She wouldn’t come. She would go home in her tennis shoes and feel nothing but a numb sort of dissatisfaction.

 _Now,_ though.

Now, Rey shifts her hips up, rubbing the slick seam of her cunt against the head of his cock. She parts around him, twitching a little when he rubs against her clit. His hard-on drapes over her abdomen, long and thick, pointing up toward her bellybutton, and it feels as heavy as it looks. A shudder rolls through her body, sending shivers racing up her spine at the thought of it, how wide it’ll make her stretch, how deep it will go once he’s inside—

“Rey,” he murmurs, tilting her body as he draws away, his eyes going black again, pupils shattering open. He brushes her entrance, hovering there, holding back. “Rey, I—”

She nudges forward on the bed, gasping a little as her folds part around him. Kylo’s whole body stiffens when she carefully, deliberately skewers herself on his cock, hissing softly as she takes half an inch.

He watches, mouth slack, eyes in rapture, letting her work her hungry cunt open on him. Her heels dig into the mattress as she squirms on her back, pushing herself up to meet him impatiently, rocking up and down his length, taking a little more with each passage. Another inch. Another.

Legs trembling from strain, Rey fucks herself with his body. Kylo grunts when she suddenly slides halfway down, his fingernails making little crescent shapes in her side.

“Fuck,” he grinds out, lashes fluttering. “ _Fuck_.”

A noise escapes her, some awful little hiccup of a sound. Kylo has finally started to respond, pressing his hips into hers. His grip on her tightens, and suddenly she is lifted off the mattress, her body held aloft as he rolls his cock through her wet warmth. Rey clings to his shoulders for dear life, sinking her fingernails into the marble of his flesh. His other hand, the one not carrying her, fists in the comforter, shredding it with an audible tear.

She’s dripping, turning to water underneath him, further ruining his sheets the way she ruined his perfect clothes. They both moan, loud, uncontrolled, when he finally bottoms out, burying himself inside her to the hilt.

For a moment, one that seems to stretch out forever, neither of them breathes. Rey looks into Kylo’s eyes, at the shock on his face that she’s sure is mirrored on her own. His gaze scatters, drifts languorously down.

It might not be shock, she thinks. It might be awe.

His lips part. He inhales, a muscle in his jaw ticking. Seconds pass while Rey wonders if he will speak.

Something deep inside her quivers. Clenches tight around her beating human heart.

His focus lingers on her mouth.

Her vision goes a little fuzzy, eyes falling half-lidded as he leans in, his nose brushing her cheek.

He’s still kissing her when he pulls back, shushing into the corner of her lips when she whimpers at the loss. Her cunt, slick and hot and wet, clings to his shaft, trying to keep him inside. He eases her along his cock like that, slowly, letting her adjust to the feeling.

Rey has had things inside her before, of course. Tampons, her fingers. The handle of a particularly smooth plastic hairbrush, one time, when she was curious.

This isn’t the same.

Kylo curses, low, as she wriggles against him, his heavy brow furrowed in what looks shockingly like real concentration. He leans back on his haunches slightly, gripping her close. Lets gravity do the work of impaling her on his length.

A startled cry is ripped from her throat, her head falling back, as he brushes, somehow, impossibly deeper.

He fills her in a way Rey couldn’t have imagined. She squirms, whines growing higher and higher in pitch while his cock stuffs her to the brim. She is split open, spread, thighs straining around his hips. Pinioned and butterflied.

Kylo goes entirely rigid, his mouth gaping open and wet. His eyes, huge and fathomless, drink her in. He stares at her like—he seems almost as if he might—

“Move,” she pants, halfway to begging, “Ben, please, just—”

Her voice is what does it.

Kylo groans, lifting her up by the waist to bounce her on his cock.

He _moves_.

His rhythm is flawless, unhurried, careful strokes that jar something deep inside her, nudging a spot that she can’t remember being there before.

Rey, by comparison, is falling to pieces.

A near-continuous stream of whimpers and moans is pulled from her as Kylo fucks into her, noises that don’t even sound like her voice eking from her chest without her permission. She feels oversensitive, raw. The friction between them warms him, heating her body until she feels, vaguely, like she might catch on fucking fire. Every brush of his cool chest against her nipples makes her wail, her knees trembling as she works to match his pace. She’s no match for him, this inexhaustible, immortal creature who is currently fixated on tugging as much pleasure from her human body as he possibly can. After a few minutes, she gives up on trying to keep up with him, letting him move her around on his cock to his liking. Kylo fucks her like she weighs nothing. Like he could go, quite literally, all night.

It isn’t long before she feels the first edges of her orgasm pulsing deep, the embarrassing little noises emerging more and more desperate. Her muscles tense, legs shaking around his hips, her whole body in a tremor.

“That’s right,” he breathes, hushed and filthy, fangs shining in his open mouth, all of him glinting in the light, “just like that, love, come for me just like that—”

Rey sobs, feeling wrecked, feeling ruined, feeling a little like clay: something soft for him to shape with his indecent hands and his relentless cock.

When she comes, shatters with him nudging her clit from the inside, his hard stomach rubbing her all sweet from the outside—when she all but shrieks into the silence of his bedroom, pulsating and falling to pieces around him—Kylo fucks her through it, his pace picking up as he strokes hard and perfect inside her body, like it’s all he was ever put on earth to do. 

“Rey,” he gasps as she starts to go limp in his arms, her body going slack, her wet cunt welcoming him inside over and over again, “oh, fuck, oh, _Rey_ —”

Kylo shoves forward with a feral groan, his cock throbbing as he empties himself, spilling deep. He finishes like that, buried fully inside her, clutching her to his chest with a kind of ferocity Rey can hardly even believe.

His forehead nudges her shoulder as he relaxes again, inch by inch, his breath lilting cool against her collarbone.

Head down, he mumbles something into her skin, something far too low for her to hear.

“Ben,” she whispers, the sound of it ticking up at the end. Her fingers flit to his cold, pale cheek, draw through soft black hair.

His face lifts, depthless eyes and sinful mouth and all. Looking up at her like she is the source of that same light that turns his skin into diamonds. Eyes overflowing with adoration, his lips shaping the edges of her name.

She whimpers as he shifts underneath her, pulling gently out of her tender cunt. The soreness she didn’t feel an hour before seems to be calling her bluff; when she flops back on the bed, legs splayed, her pussy throbs dully, feeling puffy and used, bordering right on the edge of pleasurable and painful.

Kylo drops back beside her with a grunt, his weight making the whole mattress dip and the four-poster frame shake.

Rey gulps in air as sweat cools on her skin, pebbling her nipples into soft peaks. Beside her, she can see Kylo’s chest is rising and falling perhaps slightly more rapidly than usual. His perpetually immaculate black hair mussed just a little bit too wild. As she stares, one of his oversized hands runs through it, pulling it away from his forehead. The movement reveals one of his ears, a remarkable, marvelous little detail she hadn’t noticed. It’s gigantic, his ear, and it sticks out something awful. Its twin, she assumes, is much of the same.

The sight startles a giggle out of her, an uncontainable little noise that blossoms into full-blown laughter when he turns to face her, ruining her ruminations on the loveliness of his profile.

“What’s so funny?” Kylo asks, still seeming slightly out of the breath he doesn’t need. 

Rey grins, wide and beaming, considering for the briefest moment informing him of her discovery, this little human flaw no amount of vampiric hotness could diminish. Instead, she hears herself burst out, “Is sex always like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like—” Here, Rey plays charades, miming an explosion with her fingers and palms. 

Amusement glimmers in his eyes. Fondness. Maybe even— “Sex with me is,” he says, smirking.

“Eugh,” she groans, shoving playfully at his arm which, no surprise, budges not a whit. Kylo, however, uses the opportunity of her closeness to wrap his pornographically huge hand around her forearm, tugging her closer. “You’re unbearable. Incorrigible.”

“I don’t know,” he murmurs, his eyes drifting delicately across her features, lingering on her mouth. “I think you corriged me pretty well.”

“That’s not even a word,” Rey gasps, smacking his chest with the hand not currently being held by his.

“Oh yeah, tell me what else isn’t a word.”

“Ridiculous,” she shakes her head, melodramatically mournful, her entire stomach winging with butterflies. “Absolutely absurd vampire.”

Kylo only smiles back at her, his face more open and happy than she’s ever seen him.

Something flares to life in her chest, something warm and bright. But unfamiliar. New.

As he stares at her, his smile fades slightly, a question lighting in his eyes. Rey clears her throat, darting her gaze away from his attention to look at the clouds painted on the ceiling. The...the _feeling_ is so much, so fervent, she can hardly even imagine what to do with it.

So instead, Rey subject-changes. “I can’t believe I lost my virginity to a man who didn’t use a condom.”

“Should I have worn one?” Kylo says flatly, tone dry enough to catch on fire. 

Rey snorts. “Guess it doesn’t matter. No need to worry about venereal diseases. Or pregnancy.”

It’s Kylo’s turn to huff out a laugh. “Oh, god.”

“Can you imagine? We fuck once and _boom_ : magical monster spawn. With, like, the creepiest little all-knowing baby face—”

“Please, stop, the imagery alone—”

“Maybe it’ll be born as, like, a _bat_ —”

“—way too visceral—”

“I’m still pissed, by the way,” she announces, tucking her hand under her chin so she can sit upright and look more directly at him, “that you can’t turn into a bat.”

“Is that a dream of yours?” One dark, incredulous eyebrow quirks. “To transmogrify into flying vermin?”

“I take it you’re not a fan.”

“Of bats?” He feigns a shudder. “God, no. Carriers of disease. Deadly little fuckers.”

“I always forget you were alive back when rabies was an ever-present threat.”

“It hasn’t gone away—” he points out heatedly.

“No, but now we have medicine for it.”

“The wonders of the twentieth century,” he concludes.

Rey furrows her brow. “It’s the twenty-first century,” she corrects.

He blinks. “What?” he says, sounding genuinely bewildered.

A burst of laughter bubbles out of her. “You thought this was the _twentieth_ century, oh my _god—”_

“Shut up,” he growls. In the space of a heartbeat, Kylo has rolled her back underneath him, swiftly pinning her wrists above her head with one hand.

Rey goes a little glassy-eyed as he glares down at her without an ounce of real venom to his gaze. Her back arches, pushing her still-uncovered tits against his chest.

His hips circle slowly, grinding his cock against the sticky mess between her legs. She whines, her not-quite-quelled arousal sparking to life with a vengeance. “Upstart human brat,” he accuses, voice dipping low and rough. “Have to teach you a lesson about disrespecting your elders.”

His cock stirs between them as she bucks her hips up, trying and failing to hide a smile at the way his lashes flutter. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to change me being an upstart or a brat,” she says, airy, “so I guess it’s the human part that’ll have to go.”

His pupils expand, black drowning out the red. Rey feels entirely helpless, at the complete mercy of this predator’s every whim. But, somehow, she’s never felt more assured. Safe. “Is that something you’re interested in, pet?”

Heartbeat pounding in her throat, Rey nods, undulating her lower half against the gentle rhythm Kylo has started between them, his cock dragging tortuously slow over her sensitive clit.

Impossibly, his irises darken even further, desire blooming open across his features. “Now?” he says, the word hitched at the end, a suggestion as much as it is a question.

Rey whimpers, breath caught in her throat as he bends toward her, cool lips skimming the curve of her neck.

“Right now,” he goes on, soft and dark as velvet, dropping a kiss on her pulse point where her blood thumps erratically, picking up speed, “right here?”

His jaw widens; his teeth scrape.

“Ben,” she whispers, “Ben, I want—”

“Yes, love,” he groans, the vibrations of his voice on her skin sending a thrill racing up the length of her spine, “ _anything_ , just say the word and I’ll—”

A splintering, deafening boom of noise erupts from downstairs, cutting through the moment like an airplane across an interstate bridge.

Rey bolts into a sitting position, heart hammering in her chest, as Kylo rolls leisurely onto his back, huffing out a sigh.

“Ah,” he says, “seems your ex has finally added two and two.”

“ _Rey!_ ” Finn’s voice booms from downstairs, and Rey yelps, scrambling for something to wear, finding only Kylo’s black button-down in the mountains of duvet puff. “Rey, where are you? Are you okay?”

“And I see he brought the whole family.” Kylo scoffs derisively, rolling his eyes, muttering loud enough for her to hear, “—he had _help_ and couldn’t find you for twelve fucking hours in a town this size, fucking _embarrassing—_ ”

“Kylo,” she hisses, “will you put on some pants?”

“He’ll probably have to hunt through every room just to get a whiff of your scent.”

“ _Kylo._ ”

“What? I’m just letting him follow the sound of my voice,” he says breezily as Rey groans, tearing her hands through her hair, trying to make it look slightly less sex-crazy. Oh, Jesus _Christ,_ this is going to be uncomfortable to explain. Below them, she can hear the sounds of racing footsteps, furniture being knocked and overthrown. She might hear Rose, too, or maybe it’s Kaydel. God _damn_ Poe and his stupid hero complex. She _told him_ not to follow her, and of course he just couldn't help himself.

“Behave,” she threatens, whirling around to point a finger at Kylo's face as sternly as she can manage, “just be quiet and _don’t gloat._ ”

“I have to gloat at least a little,” he deadpans, returning her wild groan of distress with nothing but the calmest, most shit-eating smile she’s ever seen on man or beast.

“Fine,” Rey grits out, panic rising in her as she hears the sounds moving up the staircase, coming closer and closer. She adjusts her position on the bed, kneeling at the edge so that the over-large shirt drapes over anything indecent. “But you’re not allowed to fight anyone, even if they attack you. Let me handle this.”

“Cross my heart,” he says, and then does so, drawing one thick finger across his bare chest in an X.

At the very last moment, Rey throws the comforter over the lower half of Kylo’s body, trying desperately to make this situation less awkward than it needs to be, with absolutely no help from the irritatingly smug vampire to her side.

The voices grow nearer, overlapping, oblivious threats to behead the big bad Kylo Ren for _stealing her away_ echoing down the winding corridor.

Rey rolls her eyes, huffing in annoyance even as the whorled golden handle of the door turns to open.

As if she hadn’t more than had a say in the matter.

Fucking _vampires_ : always with the theatrics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Well, I've been up all night—(again?) ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhCOqj4Pyb8)


End file.
